Can the Subaltern Speak ?
67
4 □ Can the Subaltern
Speak ? ,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
[...]
I
Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an
interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The
theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective
sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although
the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy and
ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political
determinations’. The much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually
inaugurates a Subject. I will argue for this conclusion by considering a text by two
great practitioners of the critique: ‘Intellectuals and power: a conversation between
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’. 1
I have chosen this friendly exchange between two activist philosophers of history
because it undoes the opposition between authoritative theoretical production and
the unguarded practice of conversation, enabling one to glimpse the track of
ideology. The participants in this conversation emphasize the most important
contributions of French poststructuralist theory: first, that the networks of
power/ desire/interest are so heterogeneous, that their reduction to a coherent
narrative is counterproductive - a persistent critique is needed; and second, that
intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society’s Other. Yet
the two systematically ignore the question of ideology and their own implication in
intellectual and economic history.
Although one of its chief presuppositions is the critique of the sovereign subject,
the conversation between Foucault and Deleuze is framed by two monolithic and
From C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds,), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
Macmillan Education: Basingstoke, 1988, pp. 271-313.
anonymous subjects-in-revolution: ‘A Maoist’ (FD, p. 205) and ‘the workers’
struggle’ (FD, p. 217). Intellectuals, however, are named and differentiated;
moreover, a Chinese Maoism is nowhere operative. Maoism here simply creates an
aura of narrative specificity, which would be a harmless rhetorical banality were it
not that the innocent appropriation of the proper name ‘Maoism’ for the eccentric
phenomenon of French intellectual ‘Maoism’ and subsequent ‘New Philosophy’
symptomatically renders ‘Asia’ transparent. 2
Deleuze’s reference to the workers’ struggle is equally problematic; it is obviously
a genuflection: ‘We are unable to touch [power] in any point of its application
without finding ourselves confronted by this diffuse mass, so that we are necessarily
led . . . to the desire to blow it up completely. Every partial revolutionary attack or
defense is linked in this way to the workers’ struggle’ (FD, p. 217). The apparent
banality signals a disavowal. The statement ignores the international division of
labor, a gesture that often marks poststructuralist political theory. 3 The invocation
of the workers’ struggle is baleful in its very innocence; it is incapable of dealing with
global capitalism: the subject-production of worker and unemployed within nation-
state ideologies in its Center; the increasing subtraction of the working class in the
Periphery from the realization of surplus value and thus from ‘humanistic’ training
in consumerism; and the large-scale presence of paracapitalist labor as well as the
heterogeneous structural status of agriculture in the Periphery. Ignoring the
international division of labor; rendering ‘Asia’ (and on occasion ‘Africa’)
transparent (unless the subject is ostensibly the ‘Third World’); reestablishing the
legal subject of socialized capital - these are problems as common to much
poststructuralist as to structuralist theory. Why should such occlusions be
sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets of heterogeneity
and the Other?
The link to the workers’ struggle is located in the desire to blow up power at any
point of its application. This site is apparently based on a simple valorization of any
desire destructive of any power. Walter Benjamin comments on Baudelaire’s
comparable politics by way of quotations from Marx:
Marx continues in his description of the conspirateurs de profession as follows: ‘. . .
They have no other aim but the immediate one of overthrowing the existing
government, and they profoundly despise the more theoretical enlightenment of the
workers as to their class interests. Thus their anger - not proletarian but plebian - at
the habits noirs (black coats), the more or less educated people who represent
[vertreten] that side of the movement and of whom they can never become entirely
independent, as they cannot of the official representatives [Reprasentanten] of the
party.’ Baudelaire’s political insights do not go fundamentally beyond the insights of
these professional conspirators. . . . Fie could perhaps have made Flaubert’s statement,
‘Of all of politics I understand only one thing: the revolt’, his own. 4
The link to the workers’ struggle is lo cated, simply, in desire. Elsewhere, Deleuze
and Guattari have attempted an alternative definition of desire, revising the one
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
offered by psychoanalysis: ‘Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object.
It is, rather, the subject that is lacking desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject;
there is no fixed subject except by repression. Desire and its object are a unity: it
is the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is machine, the object of desire
also a connected machine, so that the product is lifted from the process of producing
and something detaches itself from producing to product and gives a leftover to the
vagabond, nomad subject.’ 5
This definition does not alter the specificity of the desiring subject (or leftover
subject-effect) that attaches to specific instances of desire or to production of the
desiring machine. Moreover, when the connection between desire and the subject
is taken as irrelevant or merely reversed, the subject-effect that surreptitiously
emerges is much like the generalized ideological subject of the theorist. This may be
the legal subject of socialized capital, neither labor nor management, holding a
‘strong’ passport, using a ‘strong’ or ‘hard’ currency, with supposedly unquestioned
access to due process. It is certainly not the desiring subject as Other.
The failure of Deleuze and Guattari to consider the relations between desire,
power and subjectivity renders them incapable of articulating a theory of interests.
In this context, their indifference to ideology (a theory of which is necessary for an
understanding of interests) is striking but consistent. Foucault’s commitment to
‘genealogical’ speculation prevents him from locating, in ‘great names’ like Marx and
Freud, watersheds in some continuous stream of intellectual history. 6 This
commitment has created an unfortunate resistance in Foucault’s work to ‘mere’
ideological critique. Western speculations on the ideological reproduction of social
relations belong to that mainstream, and it is within this tradition that Althusser
writes : JThe-repmduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its
skills, but also at the same time, a reproduction of- its submission foTfie futing
ideology for the workers,, and a- reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling
ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they., too,
will provide for the domination of the ruling class “in and by words” [par la
parole].'' 7
When Foucault considers the pervasive heterogeneity of power, he does not ignore
the immense institutional heterogeneity that Althusser here attempts to schematize.
Similarly, in speaking of alliances and systems of signs, the state and war-machines
( mille plateaux), Deleuze and Guattari are opening up that very field. Foucault
cannot, however, admit that a developed theory of ideology recognizes its own
material production in institutionajity, as well as in the ‘effective instruments for the
formation and accumulation of knowledge’ {PK, p. 102). Because these philosophers
seem obliged to reject all arguments naming the concept of ideology as only
schematic rather than textual, they are equally obliged to produce a mechanically
schematic opposition between interest and desire. Thus they align themselves with
bourgeois sociologists who fill the place of ideology with a continuistic ‘unconscious’
or a parasubjective ‘culture’. The mechanical relation between desire and interest is
clear in such sentences as: ‘We never desire against our interests, because interest
always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it’ (FD, p. 215). An
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
undifferentiated desire is the agent, and power slips in to create the effects of desire:
‘power . . . produces positive effects at the level of desire - and also at the level of
knowledge’ {PK, p. 59).
This parasubjective matrix, cross-hatched with heterogeneity, ushers in the
unnamed Subject, at least for those intellectual workers influenced by the new
hegemony of desire. The race for ‘the last instance’ is now between economics and
power. Because desire is tacitly defined on an orthodox model, it is unitarily
opposed to ‘being deceived’. Ideology as ‘false consciousness’ (being deceived) has
been called into question by Althusser. Even Reich implied notions of collective will
rather than a dichotomy of deception and undeceived desire: ‘We must accept the
scream of Reich: no, the masses were not deceived; at a particular moment, they
actually desired a fascist regime’ (FD, p. 215).
These philosophers will not entertain the thought of constitutive contradiction -
that is where they admittedly part company from the Left. In the name of desire,
they reintroduce the undivided subject into the discourse of power. Foucault often
seems to conflate ‘individual’ and ‘subject’; 8 and the impact on his own metaphors
is perhaps intensified in his followers. Because of the power of the word ‘power’,
Foucault admits to using the ‘metaphor of the point which progressively irradiates
its surroundings’. Such slips become the rule rather than the exception in less careful
hands. And that radiating point, animating an effectively heliocentric discourse, fills
the empty place of the agent with the historical sun of theory, the Subject of
Europe. 9
Foucault articulates another corollary of the disavowal of the role of ideology in
reproducing the social relations of production: an unquestioned valorization of the
oppressed as subject, the ‘object being’, as Deleuze admiringly remarks, ‘to establish
conditions where the prisoners themselves would be able to speak’. Foucault adds
that ‘the masses know perfectly well, clearly’ — once again the thematic of being
undeceived - ‘they know far better than [the intellectual] and they certainly say it
very well’ (FD, pp. 206, 207).
What happens to the critique of the sovereign subject in these pronouncements?
The limits of this representationalist realism are reached with Deleuze: ‘Reality is
what actually happens in a factory, in a school, in barracks, in a prison, in a police
station’ (FD, p. 212). This foreclosing of the necessity of the difficult task of
counterhegemonic ideological production has not been salutary. It has helped
positivist empiricism - the justifying foundation of advanced capitalist neocolonialism
- to define its own arena as ‘concrete experience’, ‘what actually happens’. Indeed,
the concrete experience that is the guarantor of the political appeal of prisoners,
soldiers and schoolchildren is disclosed through the concrete experience of the
intellectual, the one who diagnoses the episteme. 10 Neither Deleuze nor Foucault
seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete
experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor.
The unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete
experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the
intellectual, is maintained by a verbal slippage. Thus Deleuze makes this remarkable
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
pronouncement: ‘A theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier’
( FD , p. 208). Considering that the verbalism of the theoretical world and its access
to any world defined against it as ‘practical’ is irreducible, such a declaration helps
only the intellectual anxious to prove that intellectual labor is just like manual labor.
It is when signifiers are left to look after themselves that verbal slippages happen.
The signifier ‘representation’ is a case in point. In the same dismissive tone
that severs theory’s link to the signifier, Deleuze declares, ‘There is no more
representation; there’s nothing but action’ - ‘action of theory and action of practice
which relate to each other as relays and form networks’ (FD, pp. 206-7). Yet an
important point is being made here: the production of theory is also a practice; the
opposition between abstract ‘pure’ theory and concrete ‘applied’ practice is too quick
and easy. 11
If this is, indeed, Deleuze’s argument, his articulation of it is problematic. Two
senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for’, as
in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation’, as in art or philosophy. Since
theory is also only ‘action’, the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the
oppressed group. Indeed, the subject is not seen as a representative consciousness
(one re-presenting reality adequately). These two senses of representation - within
state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the
other - are related but irreducibly discontinuous. To cover over the discontinuity
with an analogy that is presented as a proof reflects again a paradoxical subject-
privileging. 12 Because ‘the person who speaks and acts ... is always a multiplicity’,
no ‘theorizing intellectual . . . [or] party or . . . union’ can represent ‘those who act
and struggle’ (FD, p. 206). Are those who act and struggle mute, as opposed to
those who act and speak (FD, p. 206)? These immense problems are buried in the
differences between the ‘same’ words: consciousness and conscience (both conscience
in French), representation and re-presentation. The critique of ideological subject-
constitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now
be effaced, as can the active theoretical practice of the ‘transformation of
consciousness’. The banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically
canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent
themselves as transparent.
If such a critique and such a project are not to be given up, the shifting distinctions
between representation within the state and political economy, on the one hand, and
within the theory of the Subject, on the other, must not be obliterated. Let us
consider the play of vertreten (‘represent’ in the first sense) and darstellen (‘re-
present’ in the second sense) in a famous passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte, where Marx touches on ‘class’ as a descriptive and transformative
concept in a manner somewhat more complex than Althusser’s distinction between
class instinct and class position would allow.
Marx’s contention here is that the descriptive definition of a class can be a
differential one - its cutting off and difference from all other classes: ‘in so far as
millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that cut off their
mode of life, their interest, and their formation from those of the other classes and
Can the Subaltern Speak ? 71
place them in inimical confrontation [feindlich gegenuberstellen :], they form a
class . There is no such thing as a ‘class instinct’ at work here. In fact, the
collectivity of familial existence, which might be considered the arena of ‘instinct’,
is discontinuous with, though operated by, the differential isolation of classes. In
this context, one far more pertinent to the France of the 1970s than it can be to the
international periphery, the formation of a class is artificial and economic, and
the economic agency or interest is impersonal because it is systematic and
heterogeneous. This agency or interest is tied to the Hegelian critique of the
individual subject, for it marks the subject’s empty place in that process without a
subject which is history and political economy. Here the capitalist is defined as ‘the
conscious bearer [Trdger] of the limitless movement of capital’. 14 My point is that
Marx is not working to create an undivided subject where desire and interest
coincide. Class consciousness does not operate toward that goal. Both in the
economic area (capitalist) and in the political (world-historical agent), Marx is
obliged to construct models of a divided and dislocated subject whose parts are not
continuous or coherent with each other. A celebrated passage like the description
of capital as the Faustian monster brings this home vividly. 15
The following passage, continuing the quotation from The Eighteenth Brumaire,
is also working on the structural principle of a dispersed and dislocated class subject:
the (absent collective) consciousness of the small peasant proprietor class finds its
‘bearer’ in a ‘representative’ who appears to work in another’s interest. The word
representative here is not ‘ darstellen ’; this sharpens the contrast Foucault and
Deleuze slide over, the contrast, say, between a proxy and a portrait. There is, of
course, a relationship between them, one that has received political and ideological
exacerbation in the European tradition at least since the poet and the sophist, the
actor and the orator, have both been seen as harmful. In the guise of a post-Marxist
description of the scene of power, we thus encounter a much older debate: between
representation or rhetoric as tropology and as persuasion. Darstellen belongs to the
first constellation, vertreten - with stronger suggestions of substitution - to the
second. Again, they are related, but running them together, especially in order to
say that beyond both is where oppressed subjects speak, act and know for
themselves, leads to an essentialist, utopian politics.
Here is Marx s passage, using ‘ vertreten' where the English use ‘represent’,
discussing a social ‘subject’ whose consciousness and Vertretung (as much a
substitution as a representation) are dislocated and incoherent: The small peasant
proprietors ‘cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Their
representative must appear simultaneously as their master, as an authority over
them, as unrestricted governmental power that protects them from the other
classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence [in
the place of the class interest, since there is no unified class subject] of the
small peasant proprietors therefore finds its last expression [the implication
of a chain of substitutions - V ertretungen - is strong here] in the executive
force [Exekutivgeu/alt - less personal in German] subordinating society to
itself.’
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
73
Not only does such a model of social indirection - necessary gaps between the
source of ‘influence’ (in this case the small peasant proprietors), the ‘representative’
(Louis Napoleon), and the historical-political phenomenon (executive control) -
imply a critique of the subject as individual agent but a critique even of the
subjectivity of a collective agency. The necessarily dislocated machine of history
moves because ‘the identity of the interests’ of these proprietors ‘fails to produce a
feeling of community, national links, or a political organization’. The event of
representation as Vertretung (in the constellation of rhetoric-as-persuasion) behaves
like a Darstellung (or rhetoric-as-trope), taking its place in the gap between the
formation of a (descriptive) class and the nonformation of a (transformative) class:
‘In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that
separate their mode of life . . . they form a class. In so far as . . . the identity of their
interests fails to produce a feeling of community . . . they do not form a class.’ The
complicity of Vertreten and Darstellen, their identity-in-difference as the place of
practice - since this complicity is precisely what Marxists must expose, as Marx
does in The Eighteenth Brumaire - can only be appreciated if they are not conflated
by a sleight of word.
It would be merely tendentious to argue that this texualizes Marx too much,
making him inaccessible to the common ‘man’, who, a victim of common sense, is
so deeply placed in a heritage of positivism that Marx’s irreducible emphasis on the
work of the negative, on the necessity for de-fetishizing the concrete, is persistently
wrested from him by the strongest adversary, ‘the historical tradition’ in the air . 16
I have been trying to point out that the uncommon ‘man’, the contemporary
philosopher of practice, sometimes exhibits the same positivism.
The gravity of the problem is apparent if one agrees that the development of a
transformative class ‘consciousness’ from a descriptive class ‘position’ is not in Marx
a task engaging the ground level of consciousness. Class consciousness remains with
the feeling of community that belongs to national links and political organizations,
not to that other feeling of community whose structural model is the family.
Although not identified with nature, the family here is constellated with what Marx
calls ‘natural exchange’, which is, philosophically speaking, a ‘placeholder’ for use
value . 17 ‘Natural exchange’ is contrasted to ‘intercourse with society’, where the
word ‘intercourse’ (Verkehr) is Marx’s usual word for ‘commerce’. This ‘intercourse’
thus holds the place of the exchange leading to the production of surplus value, and
it is in the area of this intercourse that the feeling of community leading to class
agency must be developed. Full class agency (if there were such a thing) is not an
ideological transformation of consciousness .on the ground level, a desiring identity
of the agents and their interest - the identity whose absence troubles Foucault and
Deleuze. It is a contestatory replacement as well as an appropriation (a
supplementation) of something that is ‘artificial’ to begin with - ‘economic
conditions of existence that separate their mode of life’. Marx’s formulations show
a cautious respect for the nascent critique of individual and collective subjective
agency. The projects of class consciousness and of the transformation of
consciousness are discontinuous issues for him. Conversely, contemporary
invocations of ‘libidinal economy’ and desire as the determining interest, combined
with the practical politics of the oppressed (under socialized capital) ‘speaking for
themselves’, restore the category of the sovereign subject within the theory that
seems most to question it.
No doubt the exclusion of the family, albeit a family belonging to a specific class
formation, is part of the masculine frame within which Marxism marks its birth . 18
Historically as well as in today’s global political economy, the family’s role in
patriarchal social relations is so heterogeneous and contested that merely replacing
the family in this problematic is not going to break the frame. Nor does the solution
lie in the positivist inclusion of a monolithic collectivity of ‘women’ in the list of the
oppressed whose unfractured subjectivity allows them to speak for themselves
against an equally monolithic ‘same system’.
In the context of type development of a strategic, artificial and second-level
‘consciousness’, Marx uses the concept of the patronymic, always within the broader
concept of representation as Vertretung-. the small peasant proprietors are therefore
incapable of making their class interest valid in their proper name [im eigenen
Namen ] , whether through a parliament or through a convention’. The absence of
the nonfamiliar artificial collective proper name is supplied by the only proper name
‘historical tradition’ can offer - the patronymic itself - the Name of the Father:
Historical tradition produced the French peasants’ belief that a miracle would
occur, that a man named Napoleon would restore all their glory. And an individual
turned up’ - the untranslatable ‘es fand sich’ (there found itself an individual?)
demolishes all questions of agency or the agent’s connection with his interest - ‘who
gave himself out to be that man’ (this pretense is by contrast, his only proper agency)
‘because he carried [tragt - the word used for the capitalist’s relationship to capital]
the Napoleonic Code, which commands’ that ‘inquiry into paternity is forbidden’.
While Marx here seems to be working within a patriarchal metaphorics, one should
note the textual subtlety of the passage. It is the Law of the Father (the Napoleonic
Code) that paradoxically prohibits the search for the natural father. Thus, it is
according to a strict observance of the historical Law of the Father that the formed
yet unformed class’s faith in the natural father is gainsaid.
I have dwelt so long on this passage in Marx because it spells out the inner
dynamics of Vertretung, or representation in the political context. Representation
in the economic context is Darstellung, the philosophical concept of representation
as staging or, indeed, signification, which relates to the divided subject in an indirect
way. The most obvious passage is well known: ‘In the exchange relationship
[ Austauschverkaltnis ] of commodities their exchange-value appeared to us totally
independent of their use-value. But if we subtract their use-value from the product
of labour, we obtain their value, as it was just determined [ bestimmt ]. The common
element which represents itself [sich darstellt ] in the exchange relation, or the
exchange value of the commodity, is thus its value .’ 19
According to Marx, under capitalism, value, as produced in necessary and surplus
labor, is computed as the representation/ sign of objectified labor (which is
rigorously distinguished from human activity). Conversely, in the absence of a
74 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
theory of exploitation as the extraction (production), appropriation and realization
of (surplus) value as representation of labor power, capitalist exploitation must
be seen as a variety of domination (the mechanics of power as such). ‘The thrust
of Marxism’, Deleuze suggests, ‘was to determine the problem [that power is
more diffuse than the structure of exploitation and state formation] essentially in
terms of interests (power is held by a ruling class defined by its interests)’ ( FD ,
P- 214).
One cannot object to this minimalist summary of Marx’s project, just as one
cannot ignore that, in parts of the Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari build their
case on a brilliant if ‘poetic’ grasp of Marx’s theory of the money form. Yet we might
consolidate our critique in the following way: the relationship between global
capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in
geopolitics) is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of
power. To move toward such an accounting one must move toward theories of
ideology - of subject formations that micrologically and often erratically operate
the interests that congeal the macrologies. Such theories cannot afford to
overlook the category of representation in its two senses. They must note how the
staging of the world in representation - its scene of writing, its Darstellung -
dissimulates the choice of and need for ‘heroes’, paternal proxies, agents of power
- Vertretung.
My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of
representations rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing
concepts of power and desire. It is also my view that, in keeping the area of class
practice on a second level of abstraction, Marx was in effect keeping open the
(Kantian and) Hegelian critique of the individual subject as agent. 20 This view does
not oblige me to ignore that, by implicitly defining the family and the mother tongue
as the ground level where culture and convention seem nature’s own way of
organizing ‘her’ own subversion, Marx himself rehearses an ancient subterfuge. 21
In the context of poststructuralist claims to critical practice, this seems more
recuperable than the clandestine restoration of subjective essentialism.
The reduction of Marx to a benevolent but dated figure most often serves the
interest of launching a new theory of interpretation. In the Foucault-Deleuze
conversation, the issue seems to be that there is no representation, no signiher (Is
it to be presumed that the signiher has already been dispatched? There is, then, no
sign-structure operating experience, and thus might one lay semiotics to rest?);
theory is a relay of practice (thus laying problems of theoretical practice to rest) and
the oppressed can know and speak for themselves. This reintroduces the constitutive
subject on at least two levels: the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible
methodological presupposition; and the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject
of the oppressed. Further, the intellectuals, who are neither of these S/subjects,
become transparent in the relay race, for they merely report on the nonrepresented
subject and analyze (without analyzing) the workings of (the unnamed Subject
irreducibly presupposed by) power and desire. The produced ‘transparency’ marks
Can the Subaltern Speak ? 75
the place of ‘interest’; it is maintained by vehement denegation: ‘Now this role of
referee, judge, and universal witness is one which I absolutely refuse to adopt.’ One
responsibility of the critic might be to read and write so that the impossibility of such
interested individualistic refusals of the institutional privileges of power bestowed
on the subject is taken seriously. The refusal of the sign-system blocks the way to
a developed theory of ideology. Here, too, the peculiar tone of denegation is heard.
To Jacques- Alain Miller’s suggestion that ‘the institution is itself discursive’,
Foucault responds, ‘Yes, if you like, but it doesn’t much matter for my notion of
the apparatus to be able to say that this is discursive and that isn’t . . . given that
my problem isn’t a linguistic one’ (PK, p. 198). Why this conflation of language and
discourse from the master of discourse analysis?
Edward W. Said’s critique of power in Foucault as a captivating and mystifying
category that allows him ‘to obliterate the role of classes, the role of economics, the
role of insurgency and rebellion’, is most pertinent here. 22 I add to Said’s analysis
the notion of the surreptitious subject of power and desire marked by the
transparency of the intellectual. Curiously enough, Paul Bove faults Said for
emphasizing the importance of the intellectual, whereas ‘Foucault’s project
essentially is a challenge to the leading role of both hegemonic and oppositional
intellectuals’. 23 I have suggested that this ‘challenge’ is deceptive precisely because
it ignores what Said emphasizes - the critic’s institutional responsibility.
This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations,
belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible
for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that
would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that
everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the
production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as
Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was
taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect,
could occupy (invest?) its itinerary - not only by ideological and scientific
production, but also by the institution of the law. However reductionistic an
economic analysis might seem, the French intellectuals forget at their peril that this
entire overdetermined enterprise was in the interest of a dynamic economic situation
requiring that interests, motives (desires) and power (of knowledge) be ruthlessly
dislocated. To invoke that dislocation now as a radical discovery that should make
us diagnose the economic (conditions of existence that separate out ‘classes’
descriptively) as a piece of dated analytic machinery may well be to continue the
work of that dislocation and unwittingly to help in securing ‘a new balance of
hegemonic relations’. 24 I shall return to this argument shortly. In the face of the
possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as
the Selfs shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to
put the economic ‘under erasure’, to see the economic factor as irreducibly as it
reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims
to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified. 25
76 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
II
The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely
orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject
as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other
in its precarious Subject-ivity. It is well known that Foucault locates epistemic
violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme, in the redefinition of sanity at the end
of the European eighteenth century . 26 But what if that particular redefinition was
only a part of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What
if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged
parts of a vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext
of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated
knowledge’, ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate
to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the
hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’ ( PK , p. 82).
This is not to describe ‘the way things really were’ or to privilege the narrative of
history as imperialism as the best version of history . 26 It is, rather, to offer an
account of how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the
normative one. To elaborate on this, let us consider briefly the underpinnings of
the British codification of Hindu Law.
First, a few disclaimers: in the United States the third-worldism currently afloat
in humanistic disciplines is often openly ethnic. I was born in India and received my
primary, secondary and university education there, including two years of graduate
work. My Indian example could thus be seen as a nostalgic investigation of the lost
roots of my own identity. Yet even as I know that one cannot freely enter the
thickets of ‘motivations’, I would maintain that my chief project is to point out the
positivist-idealist variety of such nostalgia. I turn to Indian material because, in
the absence of advanced disciplinary training, that accident of birth and education
has provided me with a sense of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the
pertinent languages that are useful tools for a bricoleur, especially when armed with
the Marxist skepticism of concrete experience as the final arbiter and a critique of
disciplinary formations. Yet the Indian case cannot be taken as representative of all
countries, nations, cultures and the like that may be invoked as the Other of Europe
as Self.
Here, then, is a schematic summary of the epistemic violence of the codification
of Hindu Law. If it clarifies the notion of epistemic violence, my final discussion of
widow-sacrifice may gain added significance.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Hindu law, insofar as it can be described
as a unitary system, operated in terms of four texts that ‘staged’ a four-part episteme
defined by the subject’s use of memory: sruti (the heard), smriti (the remembered),
sastra (the learned-from-another) and vyavahara (the performed-in-exchange). The
origins of what had been heard and what was remembered were not necessarily
continuous or identical. Every invocation of sruti technically recited (or reopened)
the event of originary ‘hearing’ or revelation. The second two texts - the learned
Can the Subaltern Speak ? 77
and the performed - were seen as dialectically continuous. Legal theorists and
practitioners were not in any given case certain if this structure described the body
of law or four ways of settling a dispute. The legitimation of the polymorphous
structure of legal performance, ‘internally’ noncoherent and open at both ends,
through a binary vision, is the narrative of codification I offer as an example of
epistemic violence.
The narrative of the stabilization and codification of Hindu law is less well known
than the story of Indian education, so it might be well to start there . 28 Consider the
often-quoted programmatic lines from Macaulay’s infamous ‘Minute on Indian
education (1835): ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be
interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian
in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country,
to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western
nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge
to the great mass of the population .’ 29 The education of colonial subjects
complements their production in law. One effect of establishing a version of the
British system was the development of an uneasy separation between disciplinary
formation in Sanskrit studies and the native, now alternative, tradition of Sanskrit
high culture’. Within the former, the cultural explanations generated by
authoritative scholars matched the epistemic violence of the legal project.
I locate here the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 178,4, the Indian
Institute at Oxford in 1883, and the analytic and taxonomic work of scholars like
Arthur Macdonnell and Arthur Berriedale Keith, who were both colonial
administrators and organizers of the matter of Sanskrit. From their confident
utilitarian-hegemonic plans for students and scholars of Sanskrit, it is impossible to
guess at either the aggressive repression of Sanskrit in the general educational
framework or the increasing ‘feudalization’ of the performative use of Sanskrit in the
everyday life of Brahmanic-hegemonic India . 30 A version of history was gradually
established in which the Brahmans were shown to have the same intentions as (thus
providing the legitimation for) the codifying British: ‘In order to preserve Hindu
society intact [the] successors [of the original Brahmans] had to reduce everything
to writing and make them more and more rigid. And that is what has preserved
1 Hindu society in spite of a succession of political upheavals and foreign
invasions .’ 31 This is the 1925 verdict of Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri,
learned Indian Sanskritist, a brilliant representative of the indigenous elite within
colonial production, who was asked to write several chapters of a ‘History of Bengal’
projected by the private secretary to the governor general of Bengal in 191 6. 32 To
signal the asymmetry in the relationship between authority and explanation
(depending on the race-class of the authority), compare this 1928 remark by Edward
Thompson, English intellectual: ‘Hinduism was what it seemed to be ... It was a
higher civilization that won [against it], both with Akbar and the English .’ 33 And
add this, from a letter by an English soldier-scholar in the 1890s: ‘The study of
Sanskrit, “the language of the gods”, has afforded me intense enjoyment during the
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
79
last 25 years of my life in India, but it has not, I am thankful to say, led me, as it
has some, to give up a hearty belief in our own grand religion.’ 34
These authorities are the very best of the sources for the nonspecialist French
intellectual’s entry into the civilization of the Other. 35 I am, however, not referring
to intellectuals and scholars of postcolonial production, like Shastri, when I say that
the Other as Subject is inaccessible to Foucault and Deleuze. I am thinking of the
general nonspecialist, nonacademic population across the class spectrum, for whom
the episteme operates its silent programming function. Without considering the
map of exploitation, on what grid of ‘oppression’ would they place this motley
crew?
Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent,
silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women
among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban
subproletariat. According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the
standardization and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to
recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation
cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a
Marxist thematic is at work here), can speak and know their conditions. We must
now confront the following question: on the other side of the international division
of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic
violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text,
can the subaltern speak ?
Antonio Gramsci’s work on the ‘subaltern classes’ extends the class-position/ class-
consciousness argument isolated in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Perhaps because
Gramsci criticizes the vanguardistic position of the Leninist intellectual, he is
concerned with the intellectual’s role in the subaltern’s cultural and political
movement into the hegemony. This movement must be made to determine the
production of history as narrative (of truth). In texts such as ‘The Southern
question’, Gramsci considers the movement of historical-political economy in Italy
within what can be seen as an allegory of reading taken from or prefiguring an
international division of labor. 36 Yet an account of the phased development of
the subaltern is thrown out of joint when his cultural macrology is operated,
however remotely, by the epistemic interference with legal and disciplinary
definitions accompanying the imperialist project. When I move, at the end of this
essay, to the question of woman as subaltern, I will suggest that the possibility of
collectivity itself is persistently foreclosed through the manipulation of female
agency.
The first part of my proposition - that the phased development of the subaltern
is complicated by the imperialist project - is confronted by a collective of
intellectuals who may be called the ‘Subaltern Studies’ group. 37 They must ask,
Can the subaltern speak? Here we are within Foucault’s own discipline of history
and with people who acknowledge his influence. Their project is to rethink Indian
colonial historiography from the perspective of the discontinuous chain of peasant
insurgencies during the colonial occupation. This is Indeed the problem of ‘the
permission to narrate’ discussed by Said. 38 As Ranajit Guha argues,
The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism
- colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism . . . shar [ing] the prejudice that
the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness —
nationalism — which confirmed this process were exclusively or predominantly elite
achievements. In the colonialist and neo-colonialist historiographies these achievements
are credited to British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions and culture;
in the nationalist and neo-nationalist writings - to Indian elite personalities,
institutions, activities and ideas . 39
Certain varieties of the Indian elite are at best native informants for first- world
intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other. But one must nevertheless insist that
the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous.
Against the indigenous elite we may set what Guha calls ‘the politics of the
people’, both outside (‘This was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated
from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter’) and inside (‘it continued
to operate vigorously in spite of [colonialism], adjusting itself to the conditions
prevailing under the Raj and in many respects developing entirely new strains in
both form and content’) the circuit of colonial production. 40 I cannot entirely
endorse this insistence on determinate vigor and full autonomy, for practical
historiographic exigencies will not allow such endorsements to privilege subaltern
consciousness. Against the possible charge that his approach is essentialist, Guha
constructs a definition of the people (the place of that essence) that can be only an
identity-in-differential. He proposes a dynamic stratification grid describing colonial
social production at large. Even the third group on the list, the buffer group, as it
were, between the people and the great macrostructural dominant groups, is itself
defined as a place of in-betweenness, what Derrida has described as an ‘ antre ’: 41
1. Dominant foreign groups.
2. Dominant indigenous groups on the all-India level.
3. Dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local levels.
4. The terms “people” and “subaltern classes” have been used as synony-
mous throughout this note. The social groups and elements included in
this category represent the demographic difference between the total
Indian population and all those whom we have described as the “elite. ”
Consider the third item on this list - the antre of. situational indeterminacy these
careful historians presuppose as they grapple with the question, Can the subaltern
speak? ‘Taken as a whole and in the abstract this . . . category . . . was heterogeneous
in its composition and, thanks to the uneven character of regional economic and
social developments, differed from area to area. The same class or element which
was dominant in one area . . . could be among the dominated in another. This could
80 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
and did create many ambiguities and contradictions in attitudes and alliances,
especially among the lowest strata of the rural gentry, impoverished landlords, rich
peasants and upper-middle peasants all of whom belonged, ideally speaking, to the
category of “people” or “subaltern classes.’” 42
‘The task of research’ projected here is ‘to investigate, identify and measure the
specific nature and degree of the deviation of [the] elements [constituting item 3]
from the ideal and situate it historically’. ‘Investigate, identify, and measure the
specific’: a program could hardly be more essentialist and taxonomic. Yet a curious
methodological imperative is at work. I have argued that, in the Foucault-Deleuze
conversation, a postrepresentationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda. In
subaltern studies, because of the violence of imperialist epistemic, social and
disciplinary inscription, a project understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a
radical textual practice of differences. The object of the group’s investigation, in the
case not even of the people as such but of the floating buffer zone of the regional
elite-subaltern is a deviation from an ideal - the people or subaltern - which is itself
defined as a difference from the elite. It is toward this structure that the research is
oriented, a predicament rather different from the self-diagnosed transparency of the
first-world radical intellectual. What taxonomy can fix such a space? Whether or not
they themselves perceive it — in fact Guha sees his definition of ‘the people’ within
the master-slave dialectic - their text articulates the difficult task of rewriting its
own conditions of impossibility as the conditions of its possibility.
‘At the regional and local levels [the dominant indigenous groups] ... if belonging
to social strata hierarchically inferior to those of the dominant all-India groups still
acted in the interests of the latter and not in conformity to interests corresponding
truly to their own social being". When these writers speak, in their essentializing
language, of a gap between interest and action in the intermediate group, their
conclusions are closer to Marx than to the self-conscious naiveffi of Deleuze’s
pronouncement on the issue. Guha, like Marx, speaks of interest in terms of the
social rather than the libidinal being. The Name-of-the-Father imagery in The
Eighteenth Brumaire can help to emphasize that, on the level of class or group
action, ‘true correspondence to own being’ is as artificial or social as the patronymic.
So much for the intermediate group marked in item 3. For the ‘true’ subaltern
group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject
that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from
representation. The problem is that the subject’s itinerary has not been traced so as
to offer an object of seduction to the representing intellectual. In the slightly dated
language of the Indian group, the question becomes, How can we touch the
consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voice-
consciousness can the subaltern speak? Their project, after all, is to rewrite the
development of the consciousness of the Indian nation. The planned discontinuity
of imperialism rigorously distinguishes this project, however old-fashioned its
articulation, from ‘rendering visible the medical and juridical mechanisms that
surrounded the story [of Pierre Riviere]’. Foucault is correct in suggesting that to
make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer
Can the Subaltern Speak ? 81
of material which had hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been
recognized as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value’. It is the slippage from
rendering visible the mechanism to rendering vocal the individual, both avoiding
‘any kind of analysis of [the subject] whether psychological, psychoanalytical or
linguistic’, that is consistently troublesome (PK, pp. 49-50).
The critique by Ajit K. Chaudhury, a West Bengali Marxist, of Guha’s search for
the subaltern consciousness can be seen as a moment of the production process that
includes the subaltern. Chaudhury’s perception that the Marxist view of the
transformation of consciousness involves the knowledge of social relations seems to
me, in principle, astute. Yet the heritage of the positivist ideology that has
appropriated orthodox Marxism obliges him to add this rider: ‘This is not to belittle
the importance of understanding peasants’ consciousness or workers’ consciousness
in its pure form. This enriches our knowledge of the peasant and the worker and,
possibly, throws light on how a particular mode takes on different forms in different
regions, which is considered a problem of second-order importance in classical
Marxism.' 43
This variety of ‘internationalist’ Marxism, which believes in a pure, retrievable
form of consciousness only to dismiss it, thus closing off what in Marx remain
moments of productive bafflement, can at once be the object of Foucault’s and
Deleuze’s rejection of Marxism and the source of the critical motivation of the
Subaltern Studies group. All three are united in the assumption that there is a pure
form of consciousness. On the French scene, there is a shuffling of signifiers: ‘the
unconscious’, or ‘the subject-in-oppression’ clandestinely fills the space of ‘the pure
form of consciousness’. In orthodox ‘internationalist’ intellectual Marxism, whether
in the First World or the Third, the pure form of consciousness remains an idealistic
bedrock which, dismissed as a second-order problem, often earns it the reputation
of racism and sexism. In the Subaltern Studies group it needs development according
to the unacknowledged terms of its own articulation.
For such an articulation, a developed theory of ideology can again be most useful.
In a critique such as Chaudhury’s, the association of ‘consciousness’ with ‘knowledge’
omits the crucial middle term of ‘ideological production’: ‘Consciousness, according
to Lenin, is associated with a knowledge of the interrelationships between different
classes and groups; i.e., a knowledge of the materials that constitute society. . . .
These definitions acquire a meaning only within the problematic within a definite
knowledge object - to understand change in history, or specifically, change from
one mode to another, keeping the question of the specificity of a particular mode
out of the focus.' 44
Pierre Macherey provides the following formula for the interpretation of ideology:
‘What is important in a work is what it does not say. This is not the same as the
careless notation “what it refuses to say”, although that would in itself be
interesting: a method might be built on it, with the task of measuring silences,
whether acknowledged or unacknowledged. But rather this, what the work cannot
say is important, because there the elaboration of the utterance is carried out, in a
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
sort of journey to silence.’ 45 Macherey’s ideas can be developed in directions he
would be unlikely to follow. Even as he writes, ostensibly, of the literariness of the
literature of European provenance, he articulates a method applicable to the social
text of imperialism, somewhat against the grain of his own argument. Although the
notion ‘what it refuses to say’ might be careless for a literary work, something like
a collective ideological refusal can be diagnosed for the codifying legal practice of
imperialism. This would open the field for a political-economic and multidisciplinary
ideological reinscription of the terrain. Because this is a ‘worlding of the world’ on
a second level of abstraction, a concept of refusal becomes plausible here. The
archival, historiographic, disciplinary-critical and, inevitably, interventionist work
involved here is indeed a task of ‘measuring silences’. This can be a description of
‘investigating, identifying, and measuring . . . the deviation' from an ideal that is
irreducibly differential.
When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern,
the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important. In the semioses of the
social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utterance’. The
sender - ‘the peasant’ - is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable
consciousness. As for the receiver, we must ask who is ‘the real receiver’ of an
‘insurgency’? The historian, transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge’, is
only one ‘receiver’ of any collectively intended social act. With no possibility of
nostalgia for that lost origin, the historian must suspend (as far as possible) the
clamor of his or her own consciousness (or consciousness-effect, as operated by
disciplinary training), so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged with an
insurgent-consciousness, does not freeze into an ‘object of investigation’, or, worse
yet, a model for imitation. ‘The subject’ implied by the texts of insurgency can only
serve as a counterpossibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial
subject in the dominant groups. The postcolonial intellectuals learn that their
privilege is their loss. In this they are a paradigm of the intellectuals.
It is well known that the notion of the feminine (rather than the subaltern of
imperialism) has been used in a similar way within deconstructive criticism and
within certain varieties of feminist criticism. 46 In the former case, a figure of
‘woman’ is at issue, one whose minimal predication as indeterminate is already
available to the phallocentric tradition. Subaltern historiography raises questions of
method that would prevent it from using such a ruse. For the ‘figure’ of woman, the
relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race
and class differences are subsumed under that charge. Subaltern historiography must
confront the impossibility of such gestures. The narrow epistemic violence of
imperialism gives us an imperfect allegory of the general violence that is the
possibility of an episteme. 47
Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference
is doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the
ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is ‘evidence’.
It is, rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of
insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak,
the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.
The contemporary international division of labor is a displacement of the divided
field of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism. Put simply, a group of countries,
generally first- world, are in the position of investing capital; another group,
generally third-world, provide the field for investment, both through the comprador
indigenous capitalists and through their ill-protected and shifting labor force. In the
interest of maintaining the circulation and growth of industrial capital (and of the
concomitant task of administration within nineteenth-century territorial imperialism),
transportation, law and standarized education systems were developed - even as
local industries were destroyed, land distribution was rearranged, and raw material
was transferred to the colonizing country. With so-called decolonization, the growth
of multinational capital, and the relief of the administrative charge, ‘development’
does not now involve wholesale legislation and establishing educational systems in
a comparable way. This impedes the growth of consumerism in the comprador
countries. With modern telecommunications and the emergence of advanced
capitalist economies at the two edges of Asia, maintaining the international division
of labor serves to keep the supply of cheap labor in the comprador countries.
Human labor is not, of course, intrinsically ‘cheap’ or ‘expensive’. An absence of
labor laws (or a discriminatory enforcement of them), a totalitarian state (often
entailed by development and modernization in the periphery), and minimal
subsistence requirements on the part of the worker will ensure it. To keep this
crucial item intact, the urban proletariat in comprador countries must not be
systematically trained in the ideology of consumerism (parading as the philosophy
of a classless society) that, against all odds, prepares the ground for resistance
through the coalition politics Foucault mentions (ED, p. 216). This separation from
the ideology of consumerism is increasingly exacerbated by the proliferating
phenomena of international subcontracting. ‘Under this strategy, manufacturers
based in developed countries subcontract the most labor intensive stages of
production, for example, sewing or assembly, to the Third World nations where
labor is cheap. Once assembled, the multinational re-imports the goods - under
generous tariff exemptions - to the developed country instead of selling them to the
local market.' Here the link to training in consumerism is almost snapped. ‘While
global recession has markedly slowed trade and investment worldwide since 1979,
international subcontracting has boomed. ... In these cases, multinationals are
freer to resist militant workers, revolutionary upheavals, and even economic
downturns.’ 48
Class mobility is increasingly lethargic in the comprador theaters. Not surprisingly,
some members of indigenous dominant groups in comprador countries, members of
the local bourgeoisie, find the language of alliance politics attractive. Identifying
with forms of resistance plausible in advanced capitalist countries is often of a
piece with that elitist bent of bourgeois historiography described by Ranajit
Guha.
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85
Belief in the plausibility of global alliance politics is prevalent among women of
dominant social groups interested in ‘international feminism’ in the comprador
countries. At the other end of the scale, those most separated from any possibility
of an alliance among ‘women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients,
and homosexuals’ (FD, p. 216) are the females of the urban subproletariat. In
their case, the denial and withholding of consumerism and the structure of
exploitation is compounded by patriarchal social relations. On the other side of the
international division of labor, the subject of exploitation cannot know and speak
the text of female exploitation even if the absurdity of the nonrepresenting
intellectual making space for her to speak is achieved. The woman is doubly in
shadow.
Yet even this does not encompass the heterogeneous Other. Outside (though not
completely so) the circuit of the international division of labor, there are people
whose consciousness we cannot grasp if we close off our benevolence by
constructing a homogeneous Other referring only to our own place in the seat of
the Same or the Self. Here are subsistence farmers, unorganized peasant labor, the
tribals and the communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside. To
confront them is not to represent ( vertreten ) them but to learn to represent
( darstellen ) ourselves. This argument would take us into a critique of a disciplinary
anthropology and the relationship between elementary pedagogy and disciplinary
formation. It would also question the implicit demand, made by intellectuals who
choose a ‘naturally articulate’ subject of oppression, that such a subject come
through history as a foreshortened mode-of-production narrative.
That Deleuze and Foucault ignore both the epistemic violence of imperialism and
the international division of labor would matter less if they did not, in closing, touch
on third-world issues. But in France it is impossible to ignore the problem of the tiers
monde, the inhabitants of the erstwhile French African colonies. Deleuze limits his
consideration of the Third World to these old local and regional indigenous elite
who are, ideally, subaltern. In this context, references to the maintenance of the
surplus army of labor fall into reverse-ethnic sentimentality. Since he is speaking of
the heritage of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism, his reference is to the
nation-state rather than the globalizing center: ‘French capitalism needs greatly a
floating signiher of unemployment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of
the forms of repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that
the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers; repression in the
factories, because the French must reacquire the “taste” for increasingly harder
work; the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system’ (FD,
pp. 211-12). This is an acceptable analysis. Yet it shows again that the Third
World can enter the resistance program of an alliance politics directed against a
‘unified repression’ only when it is confined to the third-world groups that are
directly accessible to the First World . ^ This benevolent first-world appropriation
and reinscription of the Third World as an Other is the founding characteristic of
much third-worldism in the US human sciences today.
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
Foucault continues the critique of Marxism by invoking geographical
discontinuity. The real mark of ‘geographical (geopolitical) discontinuity’ is the
international division of labor. But Foucault uses the term to distinguish between
exploitation (extraction and appropriation of surplus value; read, the field of
Marxist analysis) and domination (‘power’ studies) and to suggest the latter’s greater
potential for resistance based on alliance politics. He cannot acknowledge that such
a monist and unified access to a conception of ‘power’ (methodologically
presupposing a Subject-of-power) is made possible by a certain stage in exploitation,
for his vision of geographical discontinuity is geopolitically specific to the First
World:
This geographical discontinuity of which you speak might mean perhaps the following:
as soon as we struggle against exploitation, the proletariat not only leads the struggle
but also defines its targets, its methods, its places and its instruments; and to ally oneself
with the proletariat is to consolidate with its positions, its ideology, it is to take up
again the motives for their combat. This means total immersion [in the Marxist
project]. But if it is against power that one struggles, then all those who acknowledge
it as intolerable can begin the struggle wherever they find themselves and in terms of
their own activity (or passivity). In engaging in this struggle that is their own, whose
objectives they clearly understand and whose methods they can determine, they enter
into the revolutionary process. As allies of the proletariat, to be sure, because power
is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation. They genuinely
serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places where they find themselves
oppressed. Women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals
have now begun a specific struggle against the particular form of power, the constraints
and controls, that are exercised over them. (FD, p. 216)
This is an admirable program of localized resistance. Where possible, this model of
resistance is not an alternative to, but can complement, macrological struggles along
‘Marxist’ lines. Yet if its situation is universalized, it accommodates unacknowledged
privileging of the subject. Without a theory of ideology, it can lead to a dangerous
utopianism.
Foucault is a brilliant thinker of power-in-spacing, but the awareness of the
topographical reinscription of imperialism does not inform his presuppositions. He
is taken in by the restricted version of the West produced by that reinscription and
thus helps to consolidate its effects. Notice the omission of the fact, in the following
passage, that the new mechanism of power in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries (the extraction of surplus value without extraeconomic coercion is its
Marxist description) is secured by means of territorial imperialism - the Earth and
its products - ‘elsewhere’. The representation of sovereignty is crucial in those
theaters: ‘In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the production of an
important phenomenon, the emergence, or rather the invention, of a new
mechanism of power possessed of highly specific procedural techniques . . . which
is also, I believe, absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty. This new
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
mechanism of power is more dependent upon bodies and what they do than the
Earth and its products’ ( PK , p. 104).
Because of a blind spot regarding the first wave of ‘geographical discontinuity’,
Foucault can remain impervious to its second wave in the middle decades of our own
century, identifying it simply ‘with the collapse of Fascism and the decline of
Stalinism’ (PK, p. 87). Here is Mike Davis’s alternative view: ‘It was rather the
global logic of counter-revolutionary violence which created conditions for the
peaceful economic interdependence of a chastened Atlantic imperialism under
American leadership. ... It was multi-national military integration under the slogan
of collective security against the USSR which preceded and quickened the inter-
penetration of the major capitalist economies, making possible the new era of
commercial liberalism which flowered between 1958 and 1973. ’ s0
It is within the emergence of this ‘new mechanism of power’ that we must read
the fixation on national scenes, the resistance to economics, and the emphasis on
concepts like power and desire that privilege micrology. Davis continues: ‘This
quasi-absolutist centralization of strategic military power by the United States was
to allow an enlightened and flexible subordinancy for its principal satraps. In
particular, it proved highly accommodating to the residual imperialist pretensions
of the French and British . . . with each keeping up a strident ideological
mobilization against communism all the while.’ While taking precautions against
such unitary notions as ‘France’, it must be said that such unitary notions as ‘the
workers’ struggle’, or such unitary pronouncements as ‘like power, resistance is
multiple and can be integrated in global strategies’ (PK, p. 142), seem interpretable
by way of Davis’s narrative. I am not suggesting, as does Paul Bove, that ‘for a
displaced and homeless people [the Palestinians] assaulted militarily and culturally
... a question [such as Foucault’s ‘to engage in politics ... is to try to know with
the greatest possible honesty whether the revolution is desirable’] is a foolish luxury
of Western wealth’. 51 I am suggesting, rather, that to buy a self-contained version
of the West is to ignore its production by the imperialist project.
Sometimes it seems as if the very brilliance of Foucault’s analysis of the centuries
of European imperialism produces a miniature version of that heterogeneous
phenomenon: management of space - but by doctors; development of administrations
- but in asylums; considerations of the periphery - but in terms of the insane,
prisoners and children. The clinic, the asylum, the prison, the university - all seem
to be screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism.
(One could open a similar discussion of the ferocious motif of ‘deterritorialization’
in Deleuze and Guattari.) ‘One can perfectly well not talk about something because
one doesn’t know about it,’ Foucault might murmur (PK, p. 66). Yet we have already
spoken of the sanctioned ignorance that every critic of imperialism must chart.
Ill
On the general level on which US academics and students take ‘influence’ from
Can the Subaltern Speak?
France, one encounters the following understanding: Foucault deals with real
history, real politics and real social problems; Derrida is inaccessible, esoteric and
textualistic. The reader is probably well acquainted with this received idea. ‘That
[Derrida’s] own work’, Terry Eagleton writes, ‘has been grossly unhistorical,
politically evasive and in practice oblivious to language as “discourse” [language in
function] is not to be denied.’ 52 Eagleton goes on to recommend Foucault’s study
of ‘discursive practices’. Perry Anderson constructs a related history: ‘With Derrida,
the self-cancellation of structuralism latent in the recourse to music or madness in
Levi-Strauss or Foucault is consummated. With no commitment to exploration of
social realities at all, Derrida had little compunction in undoing the constructions
of these two, convicting them both of a “nostalgia of origins” - Rousseauesque or
pre-Socratic, respectively - and asking what right either had to assume, on their
own premises, the validity of their discourses.’ 53
This paper is committed to the notion that, whether in defense of Derrida or not,
a nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities
within the critique of imperialism. Indeed, the brilliance of Anderson’s misreading
does not prevent him from seeing precisely the problem I emphasize in Foucault:
‘Foucault struck the characteristically prophetic note when he declared in 1966:
“Man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever
more brightly upon our horizon.” But who is the “we” to perceive or possess such
a horizon?’ Anderson does not see the encroachment of the unacknowledged Subject
of the West in the later Foucault, a Subject that presides by disavowal. He sees
Foucault’s attitude in the usual way, as the disappearance of the knowing Subject
as such; and he further sees in Derrida the final development of that tendency: ‘In
the hollow of the pronoun [we] lies the aporia of the programme.’ 54 Consider,
finally, Said’s plangent aphorism, which betrays a profound misapprehension of the
notion of ‘textuality’: ‘Derrida’s criticism moves us into the text, Foucault’s in and
out? 55
I have tried to argue that the substantive concern for the politics of the oppressed
which often accounts for Foucault’s appeal can hide a privileging of the intellectual
and of the ‘concrete’ subject of oppression that, in fact, compounds the appeal.
Conversely, though it is not my intention here to counter the specific view of Derrida
promoted by these influential writers, I will discuss a few aspects of Derrida’s work
that retain a long-term usefulness for people outside the First World. This is not an
apology. Derrida is hard to read; his real object of investigation is classical
philosophy. Yet he is less dangerous when understood than the first-world
intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak
for themselves.
I will consider a chapter that Derrida composed twenty years ago: ‘Of
grammatology as a positive science’ (OG, pp. 74-93). In this chapter Derrida
confronts the issue of whether ‘deconstruction’ can lead to an adequate practice,
whether critical or political. The question is how to keep the ethnocentric Subject
from establishing itself by selectively defining an Other. This is not a program for
the Subject as such; rather, it is a program for the benevolent Western intellectual.
88 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
For those of us who feel that the ‘subject’ has a history and that the task of the first-
world subject of knowledge in our historical moment is to resist and critique,
‘recognition’ of the Third World through ‘assimilation’, this specificity is crucial. In
order to advance a factual rather than a pathetic critique of the European
intellectual’s ethnocentric impulse, Derrida admits that he cannot ask the ‘first’
questions that must be answered to establish the grounds of his argument. He does
not declare that grammatology can ‘rise above’ (Frank Lentricchia’s phrase) mere
empiricism; for, like empiricism, it cannot ask first questions. Derrida thus aligns
‘grammatologicaP knowledge with the same problems as empirical investigation.
‘Deconstruction’ is not, therefore a new word for ‘ideological demystification’. Like
‘empirical investigation . . . tak [ing] shelter in the field of grammatological
knowledge’ obliges ‘operating] through “examples’” (OG, p. 75).
The examples Derrida lays out - to show the limits of grammatology as a positive
science - come from the appropriate ideological self-justification of an imperialist
project. In the European seventeenth century, he writes, there were three kinds of
‘prejudices’ operating in histories of writing which constituted a ‘symptom of the
crisis of European consciousness’ (OG, p. 75): the ‘theological prejudice’, the
‘Chinese prejudice’ and the ‘hieroglyphist prejudice’. The first can be indexed as:
God wrote a primitive or natural script: Hebrew or Greek. The second: Chinese is
a perfect blueprint for philosophical writing, but it is only a blueprint. True
philosophical writing is ‘independent [t] with regard to history’ (OG, p. 79) and will
sublate Chinese into an easy-to-learn script that will supersede actual Chinese. The
third: that Egyptian script is too sublime to be deciphered. The first prejudice
preserves the ‘actuality’ of Hebrew or Greek, the last two (‘rational’ and ‘mystical’,
respectively) collude to support the first, where the center of the logos is seen as the
Judaeo-Christian God (the appropriation of the Hellenic Other through assimilation
is an earlier story - a ‘prejudice’ still sustained in efforts to give the cartography of
the Judaeo-Christian myth the status of geopolitical history:
The concept of Chinese writing thus functioned as a sort of European hallucination.
. . . This functioning obeyed a rigorous necessity. ... It was not disturbed by the
knowledge of Chinese script. . . which was then available. ... A “ hieroglyphist
prejudice” had produced the same effect of interested blindness. Far from proceeding
. . . from ethnocentric scorn, the occultation takes the form of an hyperbolical
admiration. We have not finished demonstrating the necessity of this pattern. Our
century is not free from it; ..each time that ethnocentrism is precipitately and
ostentatiously reversed, some effort silently hides behind all the spectacular effects to
consolidate an inside and to draw from it some domestic benefit. (OG, p. 80; Derrida
italicizes only ‘hieroglyphist prejudice’)
Derrida proceeds to offer two characteristic possibilities for solutions to the
problem of the European Subject, which seeks to produce an Other that would
consolidate an inside, its own subject status. What follows is an account of the
complicity between writing, the opening of domestic and civil society, and the
Can the Subaltern Speak ? 89
structures of desire, power and capitalization. Derrida then discloses the
vulnerability of his own desire to conserve something that is, paradoxically, both
ineffable and nontranscendental. In critiquing the production of the colonial subject,
this ineffable, nontranscendental (‘historical’) place is cathected by the subaltern
subject.
Derrida closes the chapter by showing again that the project of grammatology is
obliged to develop within the discourse of presence. It is not just a critique of
presence but an awareness of the itinerary of the discourse of presence in one’s own
critique, a vigilance precisely against too great a claim for transparency. The word
‘writing’ as the name of the object and model of grammatology is a practice ‘only
within the historical closure, that is to say within the limits of science and
philosophy’ (OG, p. 93).
Derrida here makes Nietzschean, philosophical and psychoanalytic, rather than
specifically political, choices to suggest a critique of European ethnocentrism in the
constitution of the Other. As a postcolonial intellectual, I am not troubled that he
does not lead me (as Europeans inevitably seem to do) to the specific path that such
a critique makes necessary. It is more important to me that, as a European
philosopher, he articulates the European Subject’s tendency to constitute the Other
as marginal to ethnocentrism and locates that as the problem with all logocentric
and therefore also all grammatological endeavours (since the main thesis of the
chapter is the complicity between the two). Not a general problem, but a European
problem. It is within the context of this ethnocentricism that he tries so desperately
to demote the Subject of thinking or knowledge as to say that ‘ thought is . . . the
blank part of the text’ (OG, p, .93); that which is thought is, if blank, still in the
text and must be consigned to the Other of history. That inaccessible blankness
circumscribed by an interpretable text is what a postcolonial critic of imperialism
would like to see developed within the European enclosure as the place of the
production of theory. The postcolonial critics and intellectuals can attempt to
displace their own production only by presupposing that text-inscribed blankness.
To render thought or the thinking subject transparent or invisible seems, by
contrast, to hide the relentless recognition of the Other by assimilation. It is in the
interest of such cautions that Derrida does not invoke ‘letting the other(s) speak for
himself but rather invokes an ‘appeal’ to or ‘call’ to the ‘quite-other’ ( tout- autre as
opposed to a self-consolidating other), of ‘rendering delirious that interior voice that
is the voice of the other in us’. 56
Derrida calls the ethnocentrism of the European science of writing in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a symptom of the general crisis of European
consciousness. It is, of course, part of a greater symptom, or perhaps the crisis itself,
the slow turn from feudalism to capitalism via the first waves of capitalist imperialism.
The itinerary of recognition through assimilation of the Other can be more
interestingly traced, it seems to me, in the imperialist constitution of the colonial
subject than in repeated incursions into psychoanalysis or the ‘figure’ of woman,
though the importance of these two interventions within deconstruction should not
be minimized. Derrida has not moved (or perhaps cannot move) into that arena.
90 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Whatever the reasons for this specific absence, what I find useful is the sustained
and developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other; we can use
it to much greater analytic and interventionist advantage than invocations of the
authenticity of the Other. On this level, what remains useful in Foucault is the
mechanics of disciplinarization and institutionalization, the constitution, as it were,
of the colonizer. Foucault does not relate it to any version, early or late, proto- or
post-, of imperialism. They are of great usefulness to intellectuals concerned with
the decay of the West. Their seduction for them, and fearfulness for us, is that they
might allow the complicity of the investigating subject (male or female professional)
to disguise itself in transparency.
IV
Can the subaltern speak? What must the elite do to watch out for the continuing
construction of the subaltern? The question of ‘woman’ seems most problematic in
this context. Clearly, if you are poor, black and female you get it in three ways. If,
however, this formulation is moved from the first-world context into the
postcolonial (which is not identical with the third-world) context, the description
‘black’ or ‘of color’ loses persuasive significance. The necessary stratification of
colonial subject-constitution in the first phase of capitalist imperialism makes ‘color’
useless as an emancipatory signifier. Confronted by the ferocious standardizing
benevolence of most US and Western European human-scientific radicalism
(recognition by assimilation), the progressive though heterogeneous withdrawal of
consumerism in the comprador periphery, and the exclusion of the margins of even
the center periphery articulation (the ‘true and differential subaltern’), the analogue
of class-consciousness rather than race-consciousness in this area seems historically,
disciplinarily and practically forbidden by Right and Left alike. It is not just a
question of a double displacement, as it is not simply the problem of finding a
psychoanalytic allegory that can accommodate the third- world woman with the
first . 1
The cautions I have just expressed are valid only if we are speaking of the
subaltern woman’s consciousness - or, more acceptably, subject. Reporting on, or
better still, participating in, antisexist work among women of color or women in
class oppression in the First World or the Third World is undeniably on the agenda.
We should also welcome all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is
taking place in anthropology, political science, history and sociology. Yet the
assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and
will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution,
mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And
the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever . 57
In so fraught a field, it is not easy to ask the question of the consciousness of the
subaltern woman; it is thus all the more necessary to remind pragmatic radicals that
such a question is not an idealist red herring. Though all feminist or antisexist
Can the Subaltern Speak? 91
projects cannot be reduced to this one, to ignore it is an unacknowledged political
gesture that has a long history and collaborates with a masculine radicalism that
renders the place of the investigator transparent. In seeking to learn to speak to
(rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern
woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically ‘unlearns’ female privilege. This
systematic unlearning involves learning to critique postcolonial discourse with the
best tools it can provide and not simply substituting the lost figure of the colonized.
Thus, to question the unquestioned muting of the subaltern woman even within the
anti-imperialist project of subaltern studies is not, as Jonathan Culler suggests, to
‘produce difference by differing’ or to ‘appeal ... to a sexual identity defined as
essential and privilege experiences associated with that identity ’. 58
Culler’s version of the feminist project is possible within what Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese has called ‘the contribution of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions to the
social and political individualism of women ’. 59 Many of us were obliged to
understand the feminist project as Culler now describes it when we were still
agitating as US academics . 60 It was certainly a necessary stage in my own education
in unlearning’ and has consolidated the belief that the mainstream project of
Western feminism both continues and displaces the battle over the right to
individualism between women and men in situations of upward class mobility. One
suspects that the debate between US feminism and European ‘theory’ (as theory is
generally represented by women from the United States or Britain) occupies a
significant comer of that very terrain. I am generally sympathetic with the call to
make US feminism more ‘theoretical’. It seems, however, that the problem of the
muted subject of the subaltern woman, though not solved by an ‘essentialist’ search
for lost origins, cannot be served by the call for more theory in Anglo-America
either.
That call is often given in the name of a critique of ‘positivism’, which is seen here
as identical with ‘essentialism’. Yet Hegel, the modern inaugurator of ‘the work of
the negative’, was not a stranger to the notion of essences. For Marx, the curious
persistence ,of essentialism within the dialectic was a profound and productive
problem. Thus, the stringent binary opposition between positivism/essentialism
(read, US) and ‘theory’ (read, French or Franco-German via Anglo-American) may
be spurious. Apart from repressing the ambiguous complicity between essentialism
and critiques of positivism (acknowledged by Derrida in ‘Of grammatology as a
positive science’), it also errs by implying that positivism is not a theory. This move
allows the emergence of a proper name, a positive essence, Theory. Once again, the
position of the investigator remains unquestioned. And, if this territorial debate
turns toward the Third World, no change in the question of method is to be
discerned. This debate cannot take into account that, in the case of the woman as
subaltern, no ingredients for the constitution of the itinerary of the trace of a sexed
subject can be gathered to locate the possibility of dissemination.
Yet I remain generally sympathetic in aligning feminism with the critique of
positivism and the defetishization of the concrete. I am also far from averse to
learning from the work of Western theorists, though I have learned to insist on
92
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
93
marking their positionality as investigating subjects. Given these conditions, and as
a literary critic, I tactically confronted the immense problem of the consciousness
of the woman as subaltern. I reinvented the problem in a sentence and transformed
it into the object of a simple semiosis. What does this sentence mean? The analogy
here is between the ideological victimization of a Freud and the positionality of the
postcolonial intellectual as investigating subject.
As Sarah Kofman has shown, the deep ambiguity of Freud’s use of women as a
scapegoat is a reaction-formation to an initial and continuing desire to give the
hysteric a voice, to transform her into the subject of hysteria. 61 The masculine-
imperialist ideological formation that shaped that desire into the ‘daughter’s
seduction’ is part of the same formation that constructs the monolithic ‘third-world
woman’. As a postcolonial intellectual, I am influenced by that formation as well.
Part of our ‘unlearning’ project is to articulate that ideological formation - by
measuring silences, if necessary - into the object of investigation. Thus, when
confronted with the questions, Can the subaltern speak? and Can the subaltern (as
woman) speak?, our efforts to give the subaltern a voice in history will be doubly
open to the dangers run by Freud’s discourse. As a product of these considerations,
I have put together the sentence ‘White men are saving brown women from brown
men’ in a spirit not unlike the one to be encountered in Freud’s investigations of the
sentence ‘A child is being beaten’. 62
The use of Freud here does not imply an isomorphic analogy between subject-
formation and the behaviour of social collectives, a frequent practice, often
accompanied by a reference to Reich, in the conversation between Deleuze and
Foucault. So I am not suggesting that ‘White men are saving brown women from
brown men’ is a sentence indicating a collective fantasy symptomatic of a collective
itinerary of sadomasochistic repression in a collective imperialist enterprise. There
is a satisfying symmetry in such an allegory, but I would rather invite the reader to
consider it a problem in ‘wild psychoanalysis’ than a clinching solution. 63 Just as
Freud’s insistence on making the woman the scapegoat in ‘A child is being beaten’
and elsewhere discloses his political interests, however imperfectly, so my insistence
on imperialist subject-production as the occasion for this sentence discloses my
politics.
Further, I am attempting to borrow the general methodological aura of Freud’s
strategy toward the sentence he construed as a sentence out of the many similar
substantive accounts his patients gave him. This does not mean I will offer a case
of transference-in-analysis as, an isomorphic model for the transaction between
reader and text (my sentence). The, analogy between transference and literary
criticism or historiography is no more than a productive catachresis. To say that the
subject is a text does not authorize the converse pronouncement: the verbal text is
a subject.
I am fascinated, rather, by how Freud predicates a history of repression that
produces the final sentence. It is a history with double origin, one hidden in the
amnesia of the infant, the other lodged in our archaic past, assuming by implication
a preoriginary space where human and animal were not yet differentiated. 64 We are
driven to impose a homologue of this Freudian strategy on the Marxist narrative to
explain the ideological dissimulation of imperialist political economy and outline a
history of repression that produces a sentence like the one I have sketched. This
history also has a double origin, one hidden in the manoeuverings behind the British
abolition of widow sacrifice in 1829, 65 the other lodged in the classical and Vedic
past of Hindu India, the Rg-Veda and the Dharmasdstra. No doubt there is also an
undifferentiated preoriginary space that supports this history.
The sentence I have constructed is one among many displacements describing the
relationship between brown and white men (sometimes brown and white women
worked in). It takes its place among some sentences of ‘hyperbolic admiration’ or
of pious guilt that Derrida speaks of in connection with the ‘hieroglyphist prejudice’.
The relationship between the imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism is at
least ambiguous.
The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself
upon it. This is widow sacrifice. (The conventional transcription of the Sanskrit
word for the widow would be sati. The early colonial British transcribed it suttee.)
The rite was not practiced universally and was not caste- or class-fixed. The
abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of ‘White
men saving brown women from brown men’. White women - from the nineteenth-
century British Missionary Registers to Mary Daly - have not produced an
alternative understanding. Against this is the Indian nativist argument, a parody of
the nostalgia for lost origins: ‘The women actually wanted to die.’
The two sentences go a long way to legitimize each other. One never encounters
the testimony of the women’s voice-consciousness. Such a testimony would not be
ideology-transcendent or ‘fully’ subjective, of course, but it would have constituted
the ingredients for producing a countersentence. As one goes down the grotesquely
mistranscribed names of these women, the sacrificed widows, in the police reports
included in the records of the East India Company, one cannot put together a ‘voice’.
The most one can sense is the immense heterogeneity breaking through even such
a skeletal and ignorant account (castes, for example, are regularly described as
tribes). Faced with the dialectically interlocking sentences that are constructible as
‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’ and ‘The women wanted
to die’, the postcolonial woman intellectual asks the question of simple semiosis -
What does this mean? - and begins to plot a history.
To mark the moment when not only a civil but a good society is born out of
domestic confusion, singular events that break the letter of the law to instill its spirit
are often invoked. The protection of women by men often provides such an event.
If we remember that the British boasted of their absolute equity toward and
noninterference with native custom/law, an invocation of this sanctioned
transgression of the letter for the sake of the spirit may be read in J.D.M. Derrett’s
remark: ‘The very first legislation upon Hindu Law was carried through without the
assent of a single Hindu.’ The legislation is not named here. The next sentence,
where the measure is named, is equally interesting if one considers the implications
of the survival of a colonially established ‘good’ society after decolonization: ‘The
94
95
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
recurrence of sati in independent India is probably an obscurantist revival which
cannot long survive even in a very backward part of the country.’ 66
Whether this observation is correct or not, what interests me is that the protection
of woman (today the ‘third-world woman’) becomes a signiher for the establishment
of a good society which must, at such inaugurative moments, transgress mere
legality, or equity of legal policy. In this particular case, the process also allowed
the redefinition as a crime of what had been tolerated, known, or adulated as ritual.
In other words, this one item in Hindu law jumped the frontier between the private
and the public domain.
Although Foucault’s historical narrative, focusing solely on Western Europe, sees
merely a tolerance for the criminal antedating the development of criminology in the
late eighteenth century ( PK , p. 41), his theoretical description of the ‘episteme’ is
pertinent here: ‘The episteme is the “apparatus” which makes possible the
separation not of the true from the false, but of what may not be characterized as
scientific’ (PK, p. 197) - ritual as opposed to crime, the one fixed by superstition,
the other by legal science.
The leap of suttee from private to public has a clear and complex relationship
with the changeover from a mercantile and commercial to a territorial and
administrative British presence; it can be followed in correspondence among the
police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the prince
regent’s court, and the like. (It is interesting to note that, from the point of view of
the native ‘colonial subject’, also emergent from the feudalism-capitalism transition,
sati is a signiher with the reverse social charge: ‘Groups rendered psychologically
marginal by their exposure to Western impact . . . had come under pressure to
demonstrate, to others as well as to themselves, their ritual purity and allegiance to
traditional high culture. To many of them sati became an important proof of their
conformity to older norms at a time when these norms had become shaky
within.’ 67
If this is the first historical origin of my sentence, it is evidently lost in the history
of humankind as work, the story of capitalist expansion, the slow freeing of labor
power as commodity, that narrative of the modes of production, the transition from
feudalism via mercantilism to capitalism. Yet the precarious normativity of this
narrative is sustained by the putatively changeless stopgap of the ‘Asiatic’ mode of
production, which steps in to sustain it whenever it might become apparent that the
story of capital logic is the story of the West, that imperialism establishes the
universality of the mode of production narrative, that to ignore the subaltern today
is, willy-nilly, to continue the imperialist project. The origin of my sentence is thus
lost in the shuffle between other, more powerful discourses. Given that the abolition
of sati was in itself admirable, is it still possible to wonder if a perception of the
origin of my sentence might contain interventionist possibilities?
Imperialism’s image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the
espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. How should one
examine the dissimulation of patriarchal strategy, which apparently grants the
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
woman free choice as subject ? In other words, how does one make the move from
‘Britain’ to ‘Hinduism’? Even the attempt shows that imperialism is not identical
with chromatism, or mere prejudice against people of colour. To approach this
question, I will touch briefly on the Dharmasastra (the sustaining scriptures) and the
Rg-Veda (Praise Knowledge). They represent the archaic origin in my homology of
Freud. Of course, my treatment is not exhaustive. My readings are, rather, an
interested and inexpert examination, by a postcolonial woman, of the fabrication
of repression, a constructed counternarrative of woman’s consciousness, thus
woman’s being, thus woman’s being good, thus the good woman’s desire, thus
woman’s desire. Paradoxically, at the same time we witness the unfixed place of
woman as a signifier in the inscription of the social individual.
The two moments in the Dharmasastra that I am interested in are the discourse
on sanctioned suicides and the nature of the rites for the dead. 68 Framed in these
two discourses, the self-immolation of widows seems an exception to the rule. The
general scriptural doctrine is that suicide is reprehensible. Room is made, however,
for certain forms of suicide which, as formulaic performance, lose the phenomenal
identity of being suicide. The first category of sanctioned suicides arises out of
tatvajnana, or the knowledge of truth. Here the knowing subject comprehends the
insubstantiality or mere phenomenality (which may be the same thing as
nonphenomenality) of its identity. At a certain point in time, tat tva was interpreted
as ‘that you’, but even without that, tatva is thatness or quiddity. Thus, this
enlightened self truly knows the ‘that’-ness of its identity. Its demolition of that
identity is not atmaghata (a killing of the self). The paradox of knowing of the limits
of knowledge is that the strongest assertion of agency, to negate the possibility of
agency, cannot be an example of itself. Curiously enough, the self-sacrijice of gods
is sanctioned by natural ecology, useful for the working of the economy of Nature
and the Universe, rather than by self-knowledge. In this logically anterior stage,
inhabited by gods rather than human beings, of this particular chain of
displacements, suicide and sacrifice ( atmaghata and atmadana ) seem as little distinct
as an ‘interior’ (self-knowledge) and an ‘exterior’ (ecology) sanction.
This philosophical space, however, does not accommodate the self-immolating
woman. For her we look where room is made to sanction suicides that cannot claim
truth-knowledge as a state that is, at any rate, easily verifiable and belongs in the
area of sruti (what was heard) rather than smirti (what is remembered). This
exception to the general rule about suicide annuls the phenomenal identity of self-
immolation if performed in certain places rather than in a certain state of
enlightenment. Thus, we move from an interior sanction (truth-knowledge) to an
exterior one (place of pilgrimage). It is possible for a woman to perform this type
of (non)suicide. 69
Yet even this is not the proper place for the woman to annul the proper name of
suicide through the destruction of her proper self. For her alone is sanctioned self-
immolation on a dead spouse’s pyre. (The few male examples cited in Hindu
antiquity of self-immolation on another’s pyre, being proofs of enthusiasm and
devotion to a master or superior, reveal the structure of domination within the rite. )
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
This suicide that is not suicide may be read as a simulacrum of both truth-knowledge
and piety of place. If the former, it is as if the knowledge in a subject of its own
insubstantiality and mere phenomenality is dramatized so that the dead husband
becomes the exteriorized example and place of the extinguished subject and the
widow becomes the (non)agent who ‘acts it out’. If the latter, it is as if the metonym
for all sacred places is now that burning bed of wood, constructed by elaborate
ritual, where the woman’s subject, legally displaced from herself, is being consumed.
It is in terms of this profound ideology of the displaced place of the female subject
that the paradox of free choice comes into play. For the male subject, it is the felicity
of the suicide, a felicity that will annul rather than establish its status as such, that
is noted. For the female subject, a sanctioned self-immolation, even as it takes away
the effect of ‘fall’ ( pataka ) attached to an unsanctioned suicide, brings praise for the
act of choice on another register. By the inexorable ideological production of the
sexed subject, such a death can be understood by the female subject as an
exceptional signifier of her own desire, exceeding the general rule for a widow’s
conduct.
In certain periods and areas this exceptional rule became the general rule in a
class-specific way. Ashis Nandy relates its marked prevalence in eighteenth- and
early ninteenth-century Bengal to factors ranging from population control to
communal misogyny. 70 Certainly its prevalence there in the previous centuries was
because in Bengal, unlike elsewhere in India, widows could inherit property. Thus,
what the British see as poor victimized women going to the slaughter is in fact an
ideological battle-ground. As P. V. Kane, the great historian of the Dharmasastra,
has correctly observed: ‘In Bengal, [the fact that] the widow of a sonless member
even in a joint Hindu family is entitled to practically the same rights over joint family
property which her deceased husband would have had . . . must have frequently
induced the surviving members to get rid of the widow by appealing at a most
distressing hour to her devotion to and love for her husband’ (HD II. 2, p. 635).
Yet benevolent and enlightened males were and are sympathetic with the ‘courage’
of the woman’s free choice in the matter. They thus accept the production of the
sexed subaltern subject: ‘Modern India does not justify the practice of sati, but it
is a warped mentality that rebukes modem Indians for expressing admiration and
reverence for the cool and unfaltering courage of Indian women in becoming satis
or performing the jauhar for cherishing their ideals of womanly conduct’ (HD II. 2,
p. 636). What Jean-Frangois Lyotard has termed the ‘ dijferend ’, the inaccessibility
of, or untranslatability from, one mode of discourse in a dispute to another, is
vividly illustrated here. 71 As the discourse .of what the British perceive as heathen
ritual is sublated (but not, Lyotard would argue, translated) into what the British
perceive as crime, one diagnosis of female free will is substituted for another.
Of course, the self-immolation of widows was not invariable ritual prescription.
If, however, the widow does decide thus to exceed the letter of ritual, to turn back
is a transgression for which a particular type of penance is prescribed. 72 With the
local British police officer supervising the immolation, to be dissuaded after a
decision was, by contrast, a mark of real free choice, a choice of freedom. The
Can the Subaltern Speak?
97
ambiguity of the position of the indigenous colonial elite is disclosed in the
nationalistic romanticization of the purity, strength and love of these self-sacrificing
women. The two set pieces are Rabindranath Tagore’s paean to the ‘self-renouncing
paternal grandmothers of Bengal’ and Ananda Coomaraswamy’s eulogy of suttee as
‘this last proof of the perfect unity of body and soul’. 73
’ Obviously I am not advocating the killing of widows. I am suggesting that, within
the two contending versions of freedom, the constitution of the female subject in life
is the place of the dijferend. In the case of widow self-immolation, ritual is not being
'’redefined as superstition but as crime. The gravity of sati was that it was
ideologically cathected as ‘reward’, just as the gravity of imperialism was that it was
ideologically cathected as ‘social mission’. Thompson’s understanding of sati as
‘punishment’ is thus far off the mark:
It may seem unjust and illogical that the Moguls, who freely impaled and flayed alive,
or nationals of Europe, whose countries had such ferocious penal codes and had
known, scarcely a century before suttee began to shock the English conscience, orgies
of witch-burning and religious persecution, should have felt as they did about suttee.
But the differences seemed to them this - the victims of their cruelties were tortured
by a law which considered them offenders, whereas the victims of suttee were punished
for no offence but the physical weakness which had placed them at man’s mercy. The
rite seemed to prove a depravity and arrogance such as no other human offense had
brought to light. 74
All through the mid and late-eighteenth century, in the spirit of the codification
of the law, the British in India collaborated and consulted with learned Brahmans
to judge whether suttee was legal by their homogenized version of Hindu law. The
collaboration was often idiosyncratic, as in the case of the significance of being
dissuaded. Sometimes, as in the general Sastric prohibition against the immolation
of widows with small children, the British collaboration seems confused. 75 In the
beginning of the nineteenth century, the British authorities, and especially the British
in England, repeatedly suggested that collaboration made it appear as if the British
condoned this practice. When the law was finally written, the history of the long
period of collaboration was effaced, and the language celebrated the noble Hindu
who was against the bad Hindu, the latter given to savage atrocities:
The practice of Suttee ... is revolting to the feeling of human nature. ... In many
instances, acts of atrocity have been perpetrated, which have been shocking to the
Hindoos themselves. . . . Actuated by these considerations the Governor-General in
Council, without intending to depart from one of the first and most important
principles of the system of British Government in India that all classes of the people be
secure in the observance of their religious usages, so long as that system can be adhered
to without violation of the paramount dictates of justice and humanity, has deemed it
right to establish the following rules. (HD II. 2, pp. 624-5)
/
98 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
That this was an alternative ideology of the graded sanctioning of suicide as
exception, rather than its inscription as sin, was of course not understood. Perhaps ,
sati should have been read with martyrdom, with the defunct husband standing in
for the transcendental One; or with war, with the husband standing in for sovereign
or state, for whose sake an intoxicating ideology of self-sacrifice can be mobilized.
In actuality, it was categorized with murder, infanticide and the lethal exposure of
the very old. The dubious place of the free will of the constituted sexed subject as
female was successfully effaced. There is no itinerary we can retrace here. Since the
other sanctioned suicides did not involve the scene of this constitution, they entered
neither the ideological battleground at the archaic origin - the tradition of the
Dharmasastra - nor the scene of the reinscription of ritual as crime - the British
abolition. The only related transformation was Mahatma Gandhi’s reinscription of
the notion of satyagraha, or hunger strike, as resistance. But this is not the place
to discuss the details of that sea-change. I would merely invite the reader to compare
the auras of widow sacrifice and Gandhian resistance. The root in the first part of
satyagraha and sati are the same.
Since the beginning of the Puranic era [c. AD 400), learned Brahmans debated the
doctrinal appropriateness of sati as of sanctioned suicides in sacred places in
general. (This debate still continues in an academic way.) Sometimes the caste
provenance of the practice was in question. The general law for widows, that they
should observe brahmacarya, was, however, hardly ever debated. It is not enough
to translate brahmacarya as ‘celibacy’. It should be recognized that, of the four ages
of being in Hindu (or Brahmanical) regulative psychobiography, brahmacarya is the
social practice anterior to the kinship inscription of marriage. The man - widower
or husband - graduates through vanaprastha (forest life) into the mature celibacy
and renunciation of samnyasa (laying aside). 76 The woman as wife is indispensable
for gdrhasthya, or householdership, and may accompany her husband into forest
life. She has no access (according to Brahmanical sanction) to the final celibacy of
asceticism, or samnyasa. The woman as widow, by the general law of sacred
doctrine, must regress to an anteriority transformed into stasis. The institutional
evils attendant upon this law are well known; I am considering its asymmetrical
effect on the ideological formation of the sexed subject. It is thus of much greater
significance that there was no debate on this nonexceptional fate of widows - either
among Hindus or between Hindus and British - than that the exceptional
prescription of self-immolation was actively contended. 77 Here the possibility of
recovering a (sexually) subaltern subject is once again lost and overdetermined.
This legally programmed asymmetry in the status of the subject which effectively
defines the woman as object of one husband, obviously operates in the interest of
the legally symmetrical subject-status of the male. The self-immolation of the widow
thereby becomes the extreme case of the general law rather than an exception to it.
It is not surprising, then, to read of heavenly rewards for the sati, where the quality
of being the object of unique possessor is emphasized by way of rivalry with other
females, those ecstatic heavenly dancers, paragons of female beauty and male
pleasure who sing her praise: ‘In heaven she, being solely devoted to her husband.
Can the Subaltern Speak ? 99
and praised by groups of apsaras [heavenly dancer's] , sports with her husband as
long as fourteen Indras rule’ (HD II. 2, p. 631).
The profound irony in locating the woman’s free will in self-immolation is once
again revealed in a verse accompanying the earlier passage: ‘As long as the woman
[as wife: stri] does not burn herself in fire on the death of her husband, she is never
released [mucyate] from her female body [strisarir - i.e., in the cycle of births].’
Even as it operates the most subtle general release from individual agency, the
sanctioned suicide peculiar to woman draws its ideological strength by identifying
individual agency with the supraindividual: kill yourself on your husband’s pyre
now, and you may kill your female body in the entire cycle of birth.
In a further twist of the paradox, this emphasis on free will establishes the peculiar
misfortune of holding a female body. The word for the self that is actually burned
is the standard word for spirit in the noblest sense ( atman ), while the verb ‘release’,
through the root for salvation in the noblest sense ( muc -* moska ) is in the passive
( mocyate ), and the word for that which is annulled in the cycle of birth is the
everyday word for the body. The ideological message writes itself in the benevolent
twentieth-century male historian’s admiration: ‘The Jauhar [group self-immolation
of aristocratic Rajput war-widows or imminent war-widows] practiced by the
Rajput ladies of Chitor and other places for saving themselves from unspeakable
atrocities at the hands of the victorious Moslems are too well known to need any
lengthy notice’ (HD II. 2, p. 629).
Although jauhar is not, strictly speaking, an act of sati, and although I do not
wish to speak for the sanctioned sexual violence of conquering male armies,
‘Moslem’ or otherwise, female self-immolation in the face of it is a legitimation of
rape as ‘natural’ and works, in the long run, in the interest of unique genital
possession of the female. The group rape perpetrated by the conquerors is a
metonymic celebration of territorial acquisition. Just as the general law for widows
was unquestioned, so this act of female heroism persists among the patriotic tales
told to children, thus operating on the crudest level of ideological reproduction. It
has also played a tremendous role, precisely as an overdetermined signifier, in acting
out Hindu communalism. Simultaneously, the broader question of the consitution
of the sexed subject is hidden by foregrounding the visible violence of sati. The task
of recovering a (sexually) subaltern subject is lost in an institutional textuality at the
archaic origin.
As I mentioned above, when the status of the legal subject as property-holder
could be temporarily bestowed on the female relict, the self-immolation of widows
was stringently enforced. Raghunandana, the late fifteenth-/sixteenth-century
legalist whpse -interpretations are supposed to lend the greatest authority to such
enforcSinent, takes as his text a curious passage from the Rg-Veda, the most ancient
-^of the Hindu sacred texts, the first of the Srutis. In doing so, he is following a
centuries-old tradition, commemorating a peculiar and transparent misreading at
the very, place of sanction. Here is the verse outlining certain steps within the rites
for the dead. Even at a simple reading it is clear that it is ‘not addressed to widows
at all, but to ladies of the deceased man’s household whose husbands were living’.
100 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Why then was it taken as authoritative? This, the unemphatic transposition of the
dead for the living husband, is a different order of mystery at the archaic origin front
the ones we have been discussing: ‘Let these whose husbands are worthy and are
living enter the house with clarified butter in their eyes. Let these wives first step into
the house, tearless, healthy, and well adorned’ (HD II.2, p. 634). But this crucial
transposition is not the only mistake here. The authority is lodged in a disputed
passage and an alternate reading. In the second line, here translated ‘Let
these wives first step into the house’, the word for first is agre. Some have read it
as agne, ‘O fire’. As Kane makes clear, however, ‘even without this change Apararka
and others rely for the practice of Sati on this verse’ (HD IV. 2, p. 199). Here is
another screen around one origin of the history of the subaltern female subject. Is
it a historical oneirocritique that one should perform on a statement such as:
‘Therefore it must be admitted that either the MSS are corrupt or Raghunandana
committed an innocent slip’ (HD II. 2 p. 634)? It should be mentioned that the rest
of the poem is either about that general law of brahmacarya- in-stasis for widows,
to which sati is an exception, or about niyoga - ‘appointing a brother or any near
kinsman to raise up issue to a deceased husband by marrying his widow’. 78
If P.V. Kane is the authority on the history of the Dharmasastra, Mulla’s
Principles of Hindu Law is the practical guide. It is part of the historical text of what
Freud calls ‘kettle logic’ that we are unraveling here, that Mulla’s textbook adduces,
just as definitively, that the Rg-Vedic verse under consideration was proof that
‘remarriage of widows and divorce are recognized in some of the old texts’. 79
One cannot help but wonder about the role of the word yoni. In context, with
the localizing adverb agre (in front), the word means ‘dwelling-place’. But that does
not efface its primary sense of ‘genital’ (not yet perhaps specifically female genital).
How can we take as the authority for the choice of a widow’s self-immolation a
passage celebrating the entry of adorned wives into a dwelling place invoked on this
occasion by its yoni- name, so that the extracontextual icon is almost one of entry
into civic production or birth? Paradoxically, the imagic relationship of vagina and
fire lends a kind of strength to the authority-claim. 80 This paradox is strengthened
by Raghunandana’s modification of the verse so as to read, ‘Let them first ascend
the fluid abode [or origin, with, of course, the yow'-name - a mhantu
jalaydnimagne], O fire [or of fire].’ Why should one accept that this ‘probably
mean[s] “may fire be to them as cool as water” (HD II. 2, p. 634)? The fluid genital
of fire, a corrupt phrasing, might figure a sexual indeterminacy providing a
simulacrum for the intellectual indeterminacy of tattvajnana (truth-knowledge).
I have written above of a constructed counternarrative of woman’s consciousness,
thus woman’s being, thus woman’s being good, thus the good woman’s desire, thus
woman’s desire. This slippage can be seen in the fracture inscribed in the very word
sati, the feminine form of sat. Sat transcends any gender-specific notion of
masculinity and moves up not only into human but spiritual universality. It is the
present participle of the verb ‘to be’ and as such means not only being but the True,
the Good, the Right. In the sacred texts it is essence, universal spirit. Even as a prefix
it indicates appropriate, felicitous, fit. It is noble enough to have entered the most
Can the Subaltern Speak ? ioi
privileged discourse of modern Western philosophy: Heidegger’s meditation on
Being. 81 Sati, the feminine of this word, simply means ‘good wife.’
It is now time to disclose that sati or suttee as the proper name of the rite of
widow self-immolation commemorates a grammatical error on the part of the
British, quite as the nomenclature ‘American Indian’ commemorates a factual error
on the part of Columbus. The word in the various Indian languages is ‘the burning
of the sat? or the good wife, who thus escapes the regressive stasis of the widow
in brahmacrya. This exemplifies the race-class-gender overdeterminations of the
situation. It can perhaps be caught even when it is flattened out: white men, seeking
to save brown women from brown men, impose upon those women a greater
ideological constriction by absolutely identifying, within discursive practice, good-
wifehood with self-immolation on the husband’s pyre. On the other side of thus
constituting the object, the abolition (or removal) of which will provide the occasion
for establishing a good, as distinguished from merely civil, society, is the Hindu
manipulation of female swfyect-constitution which I have tried to discuss.
(I have already mentioned Edward Thompson’s Suttee, published in 1928. I
cannot do justice here to this perfect specimen of true justification of imperialism
as a civilizing mission. Nowhere in his book, written by someone who avowedly
‘loves India’, is there any questioning of the ‘beneficial ruthlessness’ of the British in
India as motivated by territorial expansionism or management of industrial
capital. 82 The problem with his book is, indeed, a problem of representation, the
construction of a continuous and homogeneous ‘India’ in terms of heads of state and
British administrators, from the perspective of ‘a man of good sense’ who would be
the transparent voice of reasonable humanity. ‘India’ can then be represented, in the
other sense, by its imperial masters. The reason for referring to suttee here is
Thompson’s finessing of the word sati as ‘faithful’ in the very first sentence of his
book, an inaccurate translation which is nonetheless an English permit for the
insertion of the female subject into twentieth-century discourse. 83 )
Consider Thompson’s praise for General Charles Hervey’s appreciation of the
problem of sati: ‘Hervey has a passage which brings out the pity of a system which
looked only for prettiness and constancy in woman. He obtained the names of satis
who had died on the pyres of Bikanir Rajas; they were such names as: “Ray Queen,
Sun-ray, Love’s Delight, Garland, Virtue Found, Echo, Soft Eye, Comfort,
Moonbeam, Love-lorn, Dear Heart, Eye-play, Arbour-born, Smile, Love-bud, Glad
Omen, Mist-clad, or Cloud-sprung - the last a favourite name.’” Once again,
imposing the upper-class Victorian’s typical demands upon ‘his woman’ (his
preferred phrase), Thompson appropriates the Hindu woman as his to save against
the ‘system’. Bikaner is in Rajasthan; and any discussion of widow-burnings of
Rajasthan, especially within the ruling class, was intimately linked to the positive
or negative construction of Hindu (or Aryan) communalism.
A look at the pathetically misspelled names of the satis of the artisanal, peasant,
village-priestly, moneylender, clerical and comparable social groups in Bengal,
where satis were most common, would not have yielded such a harvest (Thompson’s
preferred adjective for Bengalis is ‘imbecilic’). Or perhaps it would. There is no more
102
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
103
dangerous pastime than transposing proper names into common nouns, translating
them, and using them as sociological evidence. I attempted to reconstruct the names
on that list and began to feel Hervey-Thompson’s arrogance. What, for instance,
might ‘Comfort’ have been? Was it ‘Shanti’? Readers are reminded of the last line
of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. There the word bears the mark of one kind of
stereotyping of India - the grandeur of the ecumenical Upanishads. Or was it
‘Swasti’? Readers are reminded of the swastika, the Brahmanic ritual mark of
domestic comfort (as in ‘God Bless Our Home’) stereotyped into a criminal parody
of Aryan hegemony. Between these two appropriations, where is our pretty and
constant burnt widow? The aura of the names owes more to writers like Edward
FitzGerald, the ‘translator’ of the Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam who helped to
construct a certain picture of the Oriental woman through the supposed ‘objectivity’
of translation, than to sociological exactitude. (Said’s Orientalism, 1978, remains
the authoritative text here.) By this sort of reckoning, the translated proper names
of a random collection of contemporary French philosophers or boards of directors
of prestigious southern US corporations would give evidence of a ferocious
investment in an archangelic and hagiocentric theocracy. Such sleights of pen can
be perpetuated on ‘common nouns’ as well, but the proper name is most susceptible
to the trick. And it is the British trick with sati that we are discussing. After such
a taming of the subject, Thompson can write, under the heading ‘The psychology
of the “Sati’”, ‘I had intended to try to examine this; but the truth is, it has ceased
to seem a puzzle to me.’ 84
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation,
the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a
violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught
between tradition and modernization. These considerations would revise every
detail of judgments that seem valid for a history of sexuality in the West: ‘Such
would be the property of repression, that which distinguishes it from the
prohibitions maintained by simple penal law: repression functions well as a sentence
to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, affirmation of non-existence;
and consequently states that of all this there is nothing to say, to see, to
know.’ 85 The case of suttee as exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism would
challenge and reconstruct this opposition between subject (law) and object-of-
knowledge (repression) and mark the place of ‘disappearance’ with something
other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object
status.
Sati as a woman’s proper name is in' fairly widespread use in India today. Naming
a female infant ‘a good wife’ has its own proleptic irony, and the irony is all the
greater because this sense of the common noun is not the primary operator in the
proper name. 86 Behind the naming of the infant is the Sati of Hindu mythology,
Durga in her manifestation as a good wife. 87 In part of the story, Sati - she is
already called that - arrives at her father’s court uninvited, in the absence, even, of
an invitation for her divine husband Siva. Her father starts to abuse Siva and Sati
dies in pain. Siva arrives in a fury and dances over the universe with Sati’s corpse
on his shoulder. Vishnu dismembers her body and bits are strewn over the earth.
Around each such relic bit is a great place of pilgrimage.
Figures like the goddess Athena - ‘father’s daughters self-professedly
uncontaminated by the womb’ — are useful for establishing women’s ideological self-
debasement, which is to be distinguished from a deconstructive attitude toward the
essentialist subject. The story of the mythic Sati, reversing every narrateme of the
rite, performs a similar function: the living husband avenges the wife’s death, a
transaction between great male gods fulfills the destruction of the female body and
thus inscribes the earth as sacred geography. To see this as proof of the feminism
of Classical Hinduism or of Indian culture as goddess-centered and therefore feminist
is as ideologically contaminated by nativism or reverse ethnocentrism as it was
imperialist to erase the image of the luminous fighting Mother Durga and invest the
proper noun Sati with no significance other than the ritual burning of the helpless
widow as sacrificial offering who can then be saved. There is no space from which
the sexed subaltern subject can speak.
If the oppressed under socialized capital have no necessarily unmediated access to
‘correct’ resistance, can the ideology of sati, coming from the history of the
periphery, be sublated into any model of interventionist practice? Since this essay
operates on the notion that all such clear-cut nostalgias for lost origins are suspect,
especially as grounds for counterhegemonic ideological production, I must proceed
by way of an example. 89
(The example I offer here is not a plea for some violent Hindu sisterhood of self-
destruction. The definition o£the British Indian as Hindu in Hindu, law is one of the
marks of the ideological war- of the British against the Islamic Mughal rulers of
India; a significant skirmish in that as yet unfinished war was the division of the
subcontinent. Moreover, in my view, individual examples of this sort are tragic
failures as models of interventionist practice, since I question the production of
models as such. On the other hand, as objects of discourse analysis for the non-self-
abdicating intellectual, they can illuminate a section of the social text, in however
haphazard a way.)
A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, hanged herself
in her father’s modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. The suicide was a
puzzle since, as Bhuvaneswari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case
of illicit pregnancy. Nearly a decade later, it was discovered that she was a member
of one of the many groups involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence.
She had finally been entrusted with a political assassination. Unable to confront the
task and yet aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself.
Bhuvaneswari had known that her death would be diagnosed as the outcome of
illegitimate passion. She had therefore waited for the onset of menstruation. While
waiting, Bhuvaneswari, the brahmacarini who was no doubt looking forward to
good wifehood, perhaps rewrote the social text of stffz-suicide in an interventionist
way. (One tentative explanation of her inexplicable act had been a possible
melancholia brought on by her brother-in-law’s repeated taunts that she was too old
to be not-yet-a-wife.) She generalized the sanctioned motive for female suicide by
104 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
taking immense trouble to displace (not merely deny) in the physiological inscription
of her body, its imprisonment within legitimate passion by a single male. In the
immediate context, her act became absurd, a case of delirium rather than sanity.
The displacing gesture - waiting for menstruation - is at first a reversal of the
interdict against a menstruating widow’s right to immolate herself; the unclean
widow must wait, publicly, until the cleansing bath of the fourth day, when she is
no longer menstruating, in order to claim her dubious privilege.
In this reading, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide is an unemphatic, ad hoc,
subaltern rewriting of the social text of sari-suicide as much as the hegemonic
account of the blazing, fighting, familial Durga. The emergent dissenting
possibilities of that hegemonic account of the fighting mother are well documented
and popularly well remembered through the discourse of the male leaders and
participants in the independence movement. The subaltern as female cannot be
heard or read.
I know of Bhuvaneswari’s life and death through family connections. Before
investigating them more thoroughly, I asked a Bengali woman, a philosopher and
Sanskritist whose early intellectual production is almost identical to mine, to start
the process. Two responses: (a) Why, when her two sisters, Saileswari and
Raseswari, led such full and wonderful lives, are you interested in the hapless
Bhuvaneswari? (b) I asked her nieces. It appears that it was a case of illicit love.
I have attempted to use and go beyond Derridean deconstruction, which I do not
celebrate as feminism as such. However, in the context of the problematic I have
addressed, I find his morphology much more painstaking and useful than Foucault’s
and Deleuze’s immediate, substantive involvement with more ‘political’ issues - the
latter’s invitation to ‘become woman’ - which can make their influence more
dangerous for the US academic as enthusiastic radical. Derrida marks radical
critique with the danger of appropriating the other by assimilation. He reads
catachresis at the origin. He calls for a rewriting of the utopian structural impulse
as ‘rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us’. I must
here acknowledge a long-term usefulness in Jacques Derrida which I seem no longer
to find in the authors of The History of Sexuality and Mille Plateaux . 99
The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with ‘woman’
as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as
intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish.
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice : Selected essays and interviews,
trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY,
1977, pp. 205-17 (hereafter cited as FD). I have modified the English version of this,
as of other English translations, where faithfulness to the original seemed to demand it.
Can the Subaltern Speak ? 105
It is important to note that the greatest ‘influence’ of Western European intellectuals
upon US professors and students happens through collections of essays rather than long
books in translation. And, in those collections, it is understandably the more topical
pieces that gain a greater currency. (Derrida’s ‘Structure, sign and play’ is a case in point.)
From the perspective of theoretical production and ideological reproduction, therefore,
the conversation under consideration has not necessarily been superseded.
2. There is an implicit reference here to the post-1968 wave of Maoism in France. See
Michel Foucault, ‘On Popular Justice: a discussion with Maoists’, in Power/ Knowledge:
Selected interviews and other writings 1972-77, trans. Colin Gordon et ail., Pantheon:
.New York, p. 134 (hereafter cited as PK). Explication of the reference strengthens my
point by laying bare the mechanics of appropriation. The status of China in this discussion
is exemplary. If Foucault persistently clears himself by saying ‘I know nothing about
China’, his interlocutors show toward China what Derrida calls the ‘Chinese prejudice’.
3. This is part of a much broader symptom, as Eric Wolf discusses in Europe and the People
without History, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1982.
4. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A lyric poet in the era of high capitalism, trans.
Harry Zohn, Verso: London, 1983, p. 12.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans.
Richard Hurley et al., Viking Press: New York, 1977, p. 26.
6. The exchange with Jacques- Alain Miller in PK (‘The Confession of the Flesh’) is revealing
in this respect.
7 . Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, Monthly
Reivew Press: New York, 1971, pp. 132-3.
8. For one example among many see PK, p. 98.
9. It is not surprising, then, that Foucault’s work, early and late, is supported by too simple
a notion of repression. Here the antagonist is Freud, not Marx. ‘I have the impression
that [the notion of repression] is wholly inadequate to the analysis of the mechanisms
and effects of power that is so pervasively used to characterize today’ {PK, p. 92). The
delicacy and subtelty of Freud’s suggestion - that under repression the phenomenal
identity of affects is indeterminate because something unpleasant can be desired as
pleasure, thus radically reinscribing the relationship between desire and ‘interest’ - seems
quite deflated here. For an elaboration of this notion of repression, see Jacques Derrida,
Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press:
Baltimore, MD, 1976), pp. 88f. (hereafter cited as OG); and Derrida, Limited inc.: abc,
trans. Samuel Weber, Glyph, 2, 1977, p. 215.
10. Althusser’s version of this particular situation may be too schematic, but it nevertheless
seems more careful in its program than the argument under study. ‘Class instinct ,’
Althusser writes, ‘is subjective and spontaneous. Class position is objective and rational.
To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to
be educated-, the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and hence of intellectuals, has,
on the contrary, to be revolutionized’ {op. cit., p. 13).
11. Foucault’s subsequent explanation {PK, p. 145) of this Deleuzian statement comes closer
to Derrida’s notion that theory cannot be an exhaustive taxonomy and is always formed
by practice.
12. Cf. the surprisingly uncritical notions of representation entertained in PK, pp. 141, 188.
My remarks concluding this paragraph, criticizing intellectuals’ representations of
subaltern groups, should be rigorously distinguished from a coalition politics that takes
into account its framing within socialized capital and unites people not because they are
106
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
107
oppressed but because they are exploited. This model works best within a parliamentary
democracy, where representation is not only not banished but elaborately staged.
13. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile , trans. David Fernbach, Vintage Books: New York,
1974, p. 239.
14. idem , Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Vintage
Books: New York, 1977, p. 254.
15. ibid., p. 302.
16. See the excellent short definition and discussion of common sense in Errol Lawrence,
‘Just plain common sense: the “roots” of racism’, in Flazel V. Carby, The Empire Strikes
Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain, Hutchinson: London, 1982, p. 48.
17. ‘Use value’ in Marx can be shown to be a ‘theoretical fiction’ - as much of a potential
oxymoron as ‘natural exchange’. I have attempted to develop this in ‘Scattered i
speculations on the question of value’, a manuscript under consideration by Diacritics.
18. Derrida’s ‘Linguistic circle of Geneva’, especially pp. 143f., can provide a method for
assessing the irreducible place of the family in Marx’s morphology of class formation.
In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL,
1982.
19. Marx, Capital, 1, p. 128.
20. I am aware that the relationship between Marxism and neo-Kantianism is a politically
fraught one. I do not myself see how a continuous line can be established between Marx’s
own texts and the Kantian ethical moment. It does seem to me, however, that Marx’s
questioning of the individual as agent of history should be read in the context of the
breaking up of the individual subject inaugurated by Kant’s critique of Descartes.
21. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy, trans. Martin
Nicolaus, Viking Press: New York, 1973, pp. 162-3.
22. Edward W. Said, The World, The Text, The Critic, Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, MA, 1983, p. 243.
23. Paul Bove, ‘Intellectuals at war: Michel Foucault and the analysis of power’, Sub-Stance,
36/37, 1983, p. 44.
24. Carby et al., op. cit., p. 34.
25. This argument is developed further in Spivak, ‘Scattered speculations’. Once again, the
Anti-Oedipus did not ignore the economic text, although the treatment was perhaps too
allegorical. In this respect, the move from schizo- to rhyzo-analysis in Mille plateaux,
Seuil: Paris, 1980, has not been salutary.
26. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of
reason, trans. Richard Howard, Pantheon Books: New York, 1965, pp. 251, 262, 269.
27. Although I consider Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious: Narrative as a socially
symbolic act, Cornell University Press: New York, 1981, to be a text of great critical
weight, or perhaps because I do so, I would like my program here to be distinguished
from one of restoring the relics of a privileged narrative: ‘It is in detecting the traces of
that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and
buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious
finds its function and its necessity’ (p. 20).
28. Among many available books, I cite Bruse Tiebout McCully, English Education and the
Origins of Indian Nationalism, Columbia University Press: New York, 1940.
29. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches by Lord Macaulay: With his minute on Indian
education, ed. G.M. Young, Oxford University Press, AMS Edition: Oxford, 1979,
p. 359.
30. Keith, one of the compilers of the Vedic Index, author of Sanskrit Drama in Its Origin,
Development, Theory, and Practice, and the learned editor of the Krsnayajurveda for
Harvard University Press, was also the editor of four volumes of Selected Speeches and
Documents of British Colonial Policy (1763 to 1937), of International Affairs (1918 to
1937), and of the British Dominions (1918 to 1931). He wrote books on the sovereignty
of British dominions and on the theory of state succession, with special reference to
English and colonial law.
31. Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri, A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit
Manuscripts in the Government Collection under the Care of the Asiatic Society of
• Bengal , Society of Bengal: Calcutta, 1925, vol. 3, p. viii.
32. Dinesachandra Sena, Brhat Banga, Calcutta University Press: Calcutta, 1925, vol. 1.
p. 6.
33. Edward Thompson, Suttee: A historical and philosophical enquiry into the Hindu rite
of widow burning, George Allen & Unwin: London, 1928, pp. 130, 47.
34. Holograph letter (from G. A. Jacob to an unnamed correspondent) attached to inside
cover of the Sterling Memorial Library (Yale University) copy of Colonel G. A. Jacob
(ed.) Mahanarayana-Upanishad of the Atharva-Veda with the Dipika of Narayana, The
Government Central Books Department: Bombay, 1888, italics mine. The dark
invocation of the dangers of this learning by way of anonymous aberrants consolidates
the asymmetry.
35. I have discussed this issue in greater detail with reference to Julia Kristeva’s About
Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows, Marion Boyars: London, 1977, in ‘French
feminism in an international frame’, Yale French Studies, 62, 1981.
36. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Some aspects of the Southern question’, Selections from Political
Writing: 1921-1926, trans. Quintin Hoare, International Publishers : New York, 1978.
I am using ‘allegory of reading’ in the sense developed by Paul de Man, Allegories of
Reading: Figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, Yale University
Press: New Haven, CT, 1979.
37. Their publications are: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I : Writing on South Asian
history and society, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1982. Ranajit Guha (ed.)
Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Oxford University
Press: New Delhi, 1983; and Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency
in Colonial India, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1983.
38. Edward W. Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, London Review of Books, 16 February 1984.
39. Guha, Studies, I, p. 1.
40. ibid. , p. 4.
41. Jacques Derrida, ‘The double session’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson,
University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1981.
42. Guha, Studies, I, p. 8 (all but the first set of italics are the author’s).
43. Ajit K. Chaudhury, ‘New wave social science’, Frontier, 16-24, 28 January, 1984, p. 10
(italics are mine).
44. ibid.
45. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, Routledge:
London, 1978, p. 87.
46. I have discussed this issue in ‘Displacement and the discourse of woman’, in Mark
Krupnick (ed.) Displacement: Derrida and after, Indiana University Press: Bloomington,
IN, 1983, and in ‘Love me, love my ombre, elle: Derrida’s ‘La carte postale’, Diacritics,
14, 4, 1984, pp. 19-36.
108 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
47. This violence in the general sense that is the possibility of an episteme is what Derrida
calls ‘writing’ in the general sense. The relationship between writing in the general sense
and writing in the narrow sense (marks upon a surface) cannot be cleanly articulated.
The task of grammatology (deconstruction) is to provide a notation upon this shifting
relationship. In a certain way, then, the critique of imperialism is deconstruction as such.
48. ‘Contracting poverty’, Multinational Monitor, 4, 8, August 1983, p. 8. This report was
contributed by John Cavanagh and Joy Hackel, who work on the International
Corporations Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (italics are mine).
49. The mechanics of the invention of the Third World as signifier are susceptible to the type
of analysis directed at the constitution of race as a signifier in Carby et al., op. cit.
50. Mike Davis, ‘The political economy of late-imperial America’, New Left Review, 143,
January— February 1984, p. 9.
51. Bove op. cit., p. 51.
52. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An introduction, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, 1983, p. 205.
53. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Verso: London, 1983, p. 53.
54. ibid., p. 52.
55. Said, The World, p. 183.
56. Jacques Derrida, ‘Of an apocalyptic tone recently adapted in philosophy’, trans. John P.
Leavy, Jr., Semia, p. 71.
57. Even in such excellent texts of reportage and analysis as Gail Omvedt’s We Will Smash
This Prison\ Indian women in struggle, Zed Press: London, 1980, the assumption that
a group of Maharashtrian women in an urban proletarian situation, reacting to a radical
white woman who had ‘thrown in her lot with the Indian destiny,’ is representative of
‘Indian women’ or touches the question of ‘female consciousness in India’ is not harmless
when taken up within a first-world social formation where the proliferation of
communication in an internationally hegemonic language makes alternative accounts
and testimonies instantly accessible even to undergraduates.
Norma Chincilla’s observation, made at a panel on ‘Third World feminisms:
differences in form and content’ (UCLA, 8 March, 1983), that antisexist work in the
Indian context is not genuinely antisexist but antifeudal, is another case in point. This
permits definitions of sexism to emerge only after a society has entered the capitalist
mode of production, thus making capitalism and patriarchy conveniently continuous. It
also invokes the vexed questions of the role of the ‘“Asiatic” mode of production’ in
sustaining the explanatory power of the normative narrativization of history through the
account of modes of production, in however sophisticated a manner history is construed.
The curious role of the proper name ‘Asia’ in this matter does not remain confined to
proof or disproof of the empirical existence of the actual mode (a problem that became
the object of intense maneuvering within international communism) but remains crucial
even in the work of such theoretical subtlety and importance as Barry Hindess and Paul
Hirst’s Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, (Routledge: London, 1975) and Fredric
Jameson’s Political Unconscious. Especially in Jameson, where the morphology of modes
of production is rescued from all suspicion of historical determinism and anchored to a
poststructuralist theory of the subject, the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production, in its guise of
‘oriental despotism’ as the concomitant state formation, still serves. It also plays a
significant role in the transmogrified mode of production narrative in Deleuze and
Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, in the Soviet debate, at a far remove, indeed, from these
contemporary theoretical projects, the doctrinal sufficiency of the ‘Asiatic’ mode of
Can the Subaltern Speak ? 109
production was most often doubted by producing for it various versions and
nomenclatures of feudal, slave and communal modes of production. (The debate is
presented in detail in Stephen F. Dunn, The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of
Production, Routledge: London 1982.) It would be interesting to relate this to the
repression of the imperialist ‘moment’ in most debates over the transition from feudalism
to capitalism that have long exercised the Western Left. What is more important here
is that an observation such as Chinchilla’s represents a widespread hierarchization within
third-world feminism (rather than Western Marxism), which situates it within the long-
standing traffic with the imperialist concept-metaphor ‘Asia’.
I should add that I have not yet read Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita (eds.), In
Search of Answers: Indian women’s voices from Manushi, Zed Press: London, 1984.
58. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and criticism after structuralism, Cornell
University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1982, p. 48.
59. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘Placing women’s history in history’, New Left Review, 133,
May-June 1982, p. 21.
60. I have attempted to develop this idea in a somewhat autobiographical way in ‘Finding
feminist readings: Dante-Yeats’, in Ira Konigsberg (ed.), American Criticism in the
Postructuralist Age, University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, MI, 1981.
61. Sarah Kofman, L’Enigme de la femme: La Femme dans les textes de Freud, Galilee:
Paris, 1980.
62. Sigmund Freud. “‘A child is being beaten”: a contribution to the study of the origin of
sexual perversions’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al., Hogarth Press: London, vol. 17, 1955.
63. idem, ‘“Wild” psycho-analysis’, Standard Edition, vol. 11.
64. idem, “‘A child is being beaten’”, p. 188.
65. For a brilliant account of how the ‘reality’ of widow-sacrifice was constituted or
‘textualized’ during the colonial period, see Lata Mani, ‘The production of colonial
discourse: sati in early nineteenth-century Bengal’ (master’s thesis, University of
California at Santa Cruz, 1983). I profited from discussion with Ms Mani at the
inception of this project.
66. J. D, M. Derrett, Hindu Law Past and Present: Being an account of the controversy
which preceded the enactment of the Hindu code, and text of the code as enacted, and
some comments thereon, A. Mukherjee & Co: Calcutta, 1957, p. 46.
67. Ashis Nandy, ‘Sati: a nineteenth-century tale of women, violence and protest’, in V. C.
Joshi (ed.), Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, Vikas Publishing
House: New Delhi, 1975, p. 68.
68. The following account leans heavily on Pandurang Varman Kane, History of
Dharmasastra, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute: Poona, 1963 (hereafter cited as
HD, with volume, part and page numbers).
69. Upendra Thakur, The History of Suicide in India: An introduction, Munshi Ram
Manohan Lai: New Delhi, 1963, p. 9, has a useful list of Sanskrit primary sources on
sacred places. This laboriously decent book betrays all the signs of the schizophrenia of
the colonial subject, such as bourgeois nationalism, patriarchal communalism and an
‘enlightened reasonableness’.
70. Nandy, op. cit.
71. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Le Differend, Minuit: Paris, 1984.
72. HD, II. 2, p. 633. There are suggestions that this ‘prescribed penance’ was far exceeded
by social practice. In this passage below, published in 1938, notice the Hindu patristic
1 1 0 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
assumptions about the freedom of female will at work in phrases like ‘courage’ and
‘strength of character’. The unexamined presuppositions of the passage might be that the
complete objectification of the widow-concubine was just punishment for abdication of
the right to courage, signifying subject status. ‘Some widows, however, had not the
courage to go through the fiery ordeal; nor had they sufficient strength of mind and
character to live up to the high ascetic ideal prescribed for them [brahmacarya], It is sad
to record that they were driven to lead the life of a concubine or avarudda stri
[incarcerated wife].’ A. S. Altekar, The Position of 'Women in Hindu Civilization: From
prehistoric times to the present day , Motilal Banarsidass: New Delhi, 1938, p. 156.
73. Quoted in Sena. op. cit., 2, pp. 913-14.
74. Thompson, op. cit., p. 132.
75. Here, as well as for the Brahman debate over sati, see Mani, op. cit., pp. 71f.
76. We are speaking here of the regulative norms of Brahmanism, rather than ‘things as they
were’. See Robert Lingat, The Classical Law of India, trans. J. D. M. Derrett, University
of California Press: Berkeley, 1973, p. 46.
77. Both the vestigial possibility of widow remarriage in ancient India and the legal
institution of widow remarriage in 1856 are transactions among men. Widow remarriage
is very much an exception, perhaps because it left the program of subject-formation
untouched. In all the ‘lore’ of widow remarriage, it is the father and the husband who
are applauded for their reformist courage and selflessness.
78. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Clarendon Press: Oxford,
1899, p. 552. Historians are often impatient if modernists seem to be attempting to
import ‘feministic’ judgments into ancient patriarchies. The real question is, of course,
why structures of patriarchal domination should be unquestioningly recorded. Historical
sanctions for collective action toward social justice can only be developed if people
outside of the discipline question standards of ‘objectivity’ preserved as such by the
hegemonic tradition. It does not seem inappropriate to notice that so ‘objective’ an
instrument as a dictionary can use the deeply sexist-partisan explanatory expression:
‘raise up issue to a deceased husband’!
79. Sunderlal T. Desai, Mulla: Principles of Hindu law, N. M. Tripathi: Bombay, 1982,
p. 184.
80. I am grateful to Professor Alison Finley of Trinity College (Hartford, CT) for discussing
the passage with me. Professor Finley is an expert on the Rg-Veda. I hasten to add that
she would find my readings as irresponsibly ‘literary-critical’ as the ancient historian
would find it ‘modernist’ (see note 79).
81. Martin Heidegger. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, Doubleday
Anchor: New York, 1961, p. 58.
82. Thompson, op. cit., p. 37.
83. ibid., p. 15. For the status of the proper name as ‘mark’, see Derrida, ‘Taking chances’.
84. Thomspon, op. cit., p. 137. ...
85. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 , trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage Books:
New York, 1980, p. 4.
86. The fact that the word was also used as a form of address for a well-born woman (‘lady’)
complicates matters.
87. It should be remembered that this account does not exhaust her many manifestations
within the pantheon.
88. A position against nostalgia as a basis of counterhegemonic ideological production does
not endorse its negative use. Within the complexity of contemporary political economy,
Can the Subaltern Speak? Ill
it would, for example, be highly questionable to urge that the current Indian working-
class crime of burning brides who bring insufficient dowries and of subsequently
disguising the murder as suicide is either a use or abuse of the tradition of stftz-suicide.
The most that can be claimed is that it is a displacement on a chain of semiosis with the
female subject as signifier, which would lead us back into the narrative we have been
unraveling. Clearly, one must work to stop the crime of bride-burning in every way. If,
however, that work is accomplished by unexamined nostalgia or its opposite, it will
assist actively in the substitution of race/ethnos or sheer genitalism as a signifer in the
place of the female subject.
89. I had not read Peter Dews. ‘Power and subjectivity in Foucault’, New Left Review, 144,
1984, until I finished this essay. I look forward to his book on the same topic [Peter
Dews, The Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist thought and the claims of critical
theory. Verso: London, 1987]. There are many points in common between his critique
and mine. However, as far as I can tell from the brief essay, he writes from a perspective
uncritical of critical theory and the intersubjective norm that can all too easily exchange
‘individual’ or ‘subject’ in its situating of the ‘epistemic subject’. Dews’s reading of the
connection between ‘Marxist tradition’ and the ‘autonomous subject’ is not mine.
Further, his account of ‘the impasse of the second phase of poststructuralism as a whole’
is vitiated by his nonconsideration of Derrida, who has been against the privileging of
language from his earliest work, the ‘Introduction’ in Edmund Husserl, The Origin of
Geometry, trans. John Leavy, Nicholas Hays: Stony Brook, NY, 1978. What sets his
excellent analysis quite apart from my concerns is, of course, that the Subject within
whose History he places Foucault’s work is the Subject of the European
tradition (pp. 87—94).
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